The Fundamentals of a Recovering Fundamentalist

Book excerpt: As recovering Fundamentalists we often find ourselves unknowingly remaining within the Fundamentalist worldview. We think that if we enter into Progressive Christianity we’re leaving behind the irrational, hurtful, racist, and untrue theological worldview we were brought up in. But what if Fundamentalism is really a kind of Progressive Christianity? And both of these twin children of modernity are inherently racist, anti-Jewish, and colonial, and therefore antithetical to the brown Jewish Incarnation of the God of Israel? What if instead of leaving Fundamentalism we’ve really just changed the garbs of the Northern European Enlightenment rather than truly reorientating our whole lives towards the True, Good, and Beautiful? In this book we will examine a need for former Fundamentalists to be reintroduced to the Christian faith. One that looks backwards towards Christianity as it existed before the Enlightenment and even the Reformation. One that de-centers Christian traditions which originated out of Northern Europe by centering Christian traditions rooted in such places as Southwest Asia and North and East Africa. By criticizing modernist white Christianity the reader is guided into a Christianity that isn’t merely the other side of the same coin but looks radically different.