Christine Rosen’s Fundamentalist Education

I attended an informal conversation today at Messiah College with Christine Rosen, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. Rosen is the author of Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (Oxford, 2004), an excellent study of the way liberal Protestants in the early twentieth-century embraced eugenics. In this particular session, however, Rosen talked about the path that took her from graduate school in American history to a fellowship in a Washington D.C. think tank. She answered several questions from the students and Messiah College professors in attendance.

In preparation for her visit, I read Rosen’s memoir, My Fundamentalist Education. Anyone who has been raised in a conservative evangelical or fundamentalist household, or attended a Christian school, should read this book. Rosen writes of her experience in a fundamentalist school in Florida and how, as a child, she navigated an educational world defined by creation science, the rapture, missionary visits, a literal interpretation of the Bible, and a host of other fundamentalist beliefs.

Many of us academics and intellectuals who were raised in fundamentalism (or, as in my case, converted to it during my teenage years only to part ways with it later in life) will connect with Rosen’s narrative and sympathize with her eventual journey away from her childhood faith. Fundamentalism is a unique religious subculture and Rosen knows it well and writes well about it.

What I appreciate the most about My Fundamentalist Education is Rosen’s even-handed and honest account of her religious education. Unlike similar memoirs, Rosen does not use her story to berate the faith of her parents, her youth, or her elementary school. This is actually quite refreshing. It is obvious that Rosen has moved away from the faith of her elementary school years, but she has also found a few things to commend about her education. (I could not help but wonder just how much her fundamentalist upbringing has shaped her current critiques of technology and progress as a fellow at the EPPC and as an editor of The New Atlantis).

If Messiah College is any indication, Christian colleges are filled with former fundamentalists who have been scarred by their experience in the movement. Unfortunately, these professors often deal with the scars of their fundamentalist pasts in the midst of the unexpecting students who enroll in their courses. Education thus becomes little more than an attempt to tear down the faith or belief systems of students and replace it with a world view more in line with that of the professor. Dispassionate or neutral treatments of a subject give way to indoctrination. While many fundamentalist beliefs should certainly be questioned and criticized, such debunking must be done with care, caution, and nurturing along the way–especially in a college that claims to be “Christian” in orientation. It seems to me that Rosen, if her book is any indication, understands this. Yes, fundamentalism can leave emotional scars, but we must remember that the classroom is not the place to work out our anxieties over them.