Reply #29: I'm sorry you've lost your family

[Warpy]

Just realize that you're not alone. You have a lot of company out there in the world, people who were raised fundy and broke free for one reason or another. The anger passes, but I don't think the sadness ever does.

As for the shift in religious focus when you started high school, that was no accident, either. That's about the time Reagan took office on the backs of the Dispensationalists, and the Dispensationalists gained newfound power in a lot of denominations, especially the Southern Baptists. One group fed the other, the power elite and the Dispensationalist televangelist elite. That's why the focus shifted from the tolerant and forgiving New Testament to the intolerant and unforgiving Old Testament, cafeteria style, of course.

A lot of people seemed to go through the 60s and the drug scene and emerge from it terrified, rudderless, and lost. Religious rigidity gave them the emotional security they lacked. They grabbed it like drowning men grab flotsam. I don't know if this helps you understand what might have happened to them or if it matters, but I lost as many friends to fundydom as I did to various addictions during the 70s.

There is nothing you can do to change your parents. That you still have contact with a brother is a good sign, though. You're not completely cut off. You can always hope the fever will fade and that they'll be hit hard enough by the fallout of the last 8 horrible years to catch a clue. Just realize it probably won't happen and that you'll have to choose other people to be your family.

We're here for you, anyway.