How fundamentalism nearly destroyed my relationship with God
I was a sophomore in college when I turned my back on the religion of my childhood and declared myself no longer a Christian. I voiced my declaration to my parents in the back of my mom’s Nissan Sentra—the same one in which I had prayed the Sinner’s Prayer at five years old—outside a Target, just before we were heading in to buy Christmas gifts.
To my parents—church founders, deacons and elders, seminary graduates, and future pastor—my announcement was nothing short of catastrophic.
First came supposed evidence of God’s work: “But he healed your dad of cancer—twice! Isn’t that proof?”
“How can you forget the Lord’s goodness in your life? In our family’s life?”
“You don’t know what you’re saying. You need to pray about this.”
“What did we do wrong?”
Then I returned to school after the break, my mother quickly went to work, contacting leaders at various fellowships, giving them my email address so they could reach out to me and pull me back to the light. She called my best friend, exhorting her to talk to me. She signed me up for a summer mission trip without my consent—everything a design to drag me back to the faith, by manipulation and force if she had to.
Once I grew comfortable with my new identity as a non-Christian enough to tell others, as Christians call them, more than one friend would say, “You’re the last person I’d have expected that from.”
I stopped going to church and fellowship. People would visit me and tell me it was important to “be part of the family of God.” When I still refused, most stopped talking to me altogether. I still remember the moment someone from my former small group passed me on the way to class, looked me straight in the eyes when I waved at her, then pretended not to know me.
Family of God, indeed.
But almost no one asked me why. Why did I turn away?
To answer such a question is to peel apart the years, not only from my own history, but from church history. What a monumental task, and yet I shall endeavour to meet it as best I can, though I claim no expertise in any subject. I promise only to write as I have always done—with sensitivity and clarity.
Perhaps the question to answer in the end is, why did I come back to faith? That also is a complex answer, but one I can somewhat give right now is this: deconstruction is a starting place only. Once the building and foundation has been taken apart, examined, one must still reconstruct—to build one stronger than before.
I hope that is what I have done. Though to the most unwaveringly certain of us, my faith appears tenuous on the surface, full of questions and doubts, it now holds together with cords of steel. Uncertainty is no longer an enemy but an invitation to go deeper.
What is Christian fundamentalism?
With that, I come to my first point: fundamentalism, defined by Dr. Laura E. Anderson as “a pattern of thinking and relating; it is the belief that a certain person or group of people know the right way to think, act, talk, relate, believe, and engage with the world and that those who do not subscribe to this worldview are lesser than, dangerous, pitied, hard to relate to, or to be avoided” (When Religion Hurts You, 2025).
I’d add to that definition, “a way of thinking that punishes any deviance from the norm through shaming, passive aggressiveness, ostracisation, and exile.”
As an aside, religion has not cornered the market on fundamentalism, as Dr. Anderson points out in her book. In fact, believing this to be the case can blind you to it in other groups you end up aligning yourself with—repeating the same pattern but wearing a different face. I’ve observed this in a variety of contexts, but for the purposes of this essay, I’ll be focusing on fundamentalist Christianity.
Here’s what’s so dangerous about raising a child in this environment: it leaves no room for them to learn how to think about themselves. Critical thinking is discouraged because questioning authority is not allowed. A hierarchy exists, and a child resides at the very bottom. He is told what is good, what is bad, how to behave, what to think, what is true.
Now, I was one of those precocious children who enjoyed picking apart the holy text even from a young age. I remember bombarding my Sunday school teachers and parents with questions, sometimes even calling my teachers on the phone to ask more questions during the week. I wanted to know how Lot’s wife could have physically turned to salt. I wanted to know how predestination worked. What happened to the dinosaurs? Did Noah’s ark have all the insects, too? My thirst to understand was insatiable.
To their credit, they did their best to answer many of my queries.
Certain types were not met with such patience, however. A vivid memory from when I was perhaps eight or nine comes to mind. My family was on a road trip somewhere. Passing by towering rocks on both sides, I randomly said, “God made everything.”
“WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?!”
I jumped in shock. My dad almost never raised his voice, but now it carried over the traffic and engine noise.
“YOU DO NOT DISRESPECT GOD LIKE THAT. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? GOD IS NOT IN EVERYTHING”
After a long silence, I said, “I didn’t say God was in everything. I said God made everything.”
There was no response from the front of the car.
A black-and-white morality
“In other words, [Marlene] Winell has recognized a sort of codependency that can occur within highly controlled religious groups between the devout and their leaders. The follower transfers the authority of God to their leader, seeing the leader and God as essentially synonymous.”
—Liz Charlotte Grant, Knock at the Sky
Pastors, teachers, and parents all preached about the unconditional love and goodness of God. I lapped it up like a dying animal even though I didn’t understand what it meant. Because juxtaposed with that message was this: “Be good because God delights in good children.”
But what did it mean to be good? Was it something secret I simply needed to unlock? Perhaps if I tried hard enough, I could do it. Certainly it appeared that way: the constant expectation to behave, to do well. Obey. Anything less than perfection meant beatings, screaming lectures, objects thrown at my head.
“You have to be good.”
There are some cultural traits at play here. East Asian culture is also performance and shame-based. I think something about the certainty of set ways of behaving appeals to this rule-following population.
Dr. Anderson puts it like this:
[Fundamentalism] gives specific, orderly, binary, prescriptive ways of engaging with life. It’s a measuring stick that let’s you know how you are doing and what you can do more (or less) of to remain in good standing and, therefore, safe and stable. Doing or thinking what the specific fundamentalist group prescribes can give you a sense of peace and reassure you that you are not in danger because you are doing what you are supposed to be doing.
I get why it appeals, especially to East Asian immigrant communities who have often escaped turbulence in their home countries. It’s easier to read a text literally than to approach that same text with nuance.
To be good, I figured, meant staying within the lines drawn for me, around me. Remain meek, quiet — that was what God created me to be, after all. It meant good behaviour, which in my context meant total obedience to both spoken and unspoken rules.
And I learned to wrap the unwanted, undesirable pieces of myself in soft paper, to conceal them from all others deep within myself. You see, I wasn’t the quiet girl my mom wanted me to be. I was something of a wildling with bursts of excitement (either joyful or not). My parents didn’t seem to know what to do with me. They told me to be more like J at church, who was quiet and sweet, or H who at least pretended to be. I tried my best but never could manage it. Instead, I earned looks of disapproval and shaking heads in my direction, long lectures about ladyhood, and how to be a humble and subservient girl for Jesus. No matter how hard I tried, the secret to being a good Christian girl eluded me.
So I began to pray for God to let me be good as soon as I woke, that I might not see looks of disappointment on the faces of those I most wished to please.
God of the Bible versus God of the church
Adolescence proved a turbulent valley to cross, as it is for most fortunate enough to pass through it. Certain experiences branded themselves into my mind, caused me to question the dissonance between what I read in the Bible and what I observed in daily life. I had begun to gather up the disparate threads from what I’d been taught since childhood, what I’d seen and heard, and what I’d read.
Like the time I was only about six, when there came a knock on our front door. I wanted to run to open it, but my mom stopped me, always pretending we weren’t at home unless she’d looked through the peephole first. From a certain spot on our staircase, I’d found a way to catch a glimpse of the entry, so I watched a black man knock once and wait before finally walking away. My mom then told me black people were dangerous.
Like the time our car had stopped at a traffic light in front of a homeless lady. It was the first time I remember seeing someone without a home, and it made me curious why someone had such a tattered gray blanket in the middle of a highway exit. My parents promptly instructed me never to look at homeless people—just pretend they aren’t there, otherwise they would ask for money.
Like the time a boy at the church I attended got suspended for wearing a “Vote Prop 8” shirt (among other sayings), and others at the church both praised him and protested his suspension. Many members of my church had Prop 8 signs on their front lawns. And while I didn’t understand anything about it, I supposed the authority figures were supposed to be God’s mouthpieces, which meant God said gay people were an abomination.
I wondered why God didn’t care about those people, if the church was supposed to be His hands and feet. I wondered about suffering and why God seemed to turn His face away from those most in pain—why children starved to death while others gorged themselves.
Then wondered if it was me. If I was the wrong thing in the equation.
But I was a good fundamentalist—for the most part. I obeyed my parents and made them proud, got stellar grades, kept myself pure and away from boys. I read my Bible and prayed daily (this at least was not forced; I did love God and enjoyed spending time with Him). I had the book of James pretty much memorised, because my mom made us copy the whole thing word for word as punishment when we left the path of righteousness.
Most importantly, I adhered to the beliefs of my church. That’s how it was.
Control by fear
By high school, I was reading hermeneutics and theology books for fun. Oh, I am nothing, if not obsessive. After all, one of the tenets of evangelicalism is that every non-Christian is going to hell, and Jesus is coming back any day.
Any. Day.
I had a post-it note pinned to my desk to remind me of this—right in front of my eyes so I had to look at it constantly: “Jesus is coming today. Are you ready?”
Yes, it was incredibly fear-inducing. Yes, I still have what Dr. Anderson calls “rapture anxiety.”
Because of these two undeniable realities, I felt an urgency to ensure I was right with God at all times, and to evangelise to as many friends as possible. I could not have them going to hell. Not only did I have to fight against the possibility of Jesus coming any second, but so was death. Growing up under the uncertainty of my father’s leukemia diagnosis and the death of a childhood friend made me keenly aware of that.
There it is, then: fear—the feeling that permeated my religious upbringing. My childhood reeked of it.
This is how you keep people small: condition them to be afraid of everything that doesn’t come from you.
The church’s response to mental illness
High school changed me, though. The depression that had prowled at my borders since my childhood had only grown. Once my father’s leukemia returned just before my first year of that changing season, it pounced upon me. And I, who had never been taught mental illness even existed, succumbed suddenly and quickly under its claws.
Those four years were marked by a fundamental shift. After years of trying—and failing—to please, I finally gave up. Open rebellion became my way. My internal response to my mom’s lament, “Why are you so rebellious?” was, “I’ll show you rebelliousness.”
Depression carpeted my floors with indifference, and despair became my walls. They trapped me in my mind. Regardless of what my parents or youth leaders said, no amount of praying or Bible-reading could siphon it from me. I felt made of the stuff.
“Pray harder.”
“Find your joy in the Lord.”
“Depression is a sign of someone not right with God.”
Like grief, mental illness and other negative emotions like anger have no place in a good Christian’s life. It was perceived as being ungrateful for God’s great sacrifice and blessings. Dr. Anderson calls this “spiritual bypassing,” that is, downplaying intense negative experiences and feelings with spiritual band-aids like, “God will work everything out for good” and “God has a purpose for your suffering.” I’m convinced these phrases were meant to be read alone as encouragement from God, not from one person to another.
So, because I only grew worse as high school went on, my parents instead began believing me demon-possessed because I was “so full of darkness.” Mental health services were denied me (in fact, I don’t recall knowing they were available back then) because mental illness, again, was not a real thing. Every battle was a spiritual battle, according to Ephesians 6:12: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
Not until I overdosed on Ibuprofen halfway through my senior year did I finally meet with a professional therapist after the 72-hour hold—3 mandatory sessions, after which I attended no more. Before I was released, I was offered antidepressants, which my parents refused. When they weren’t in the room, the nurse said I could ask for them myself if I wished soon. I’d be turning eighteen in a month.
I never did. Nor did I ever proactively seek out therapy on my own.
By the time I turned eighteen, my mom had scared me with tales of becoming addicted to antidepressants and their ineffectiveness, told me that if I went on them I’d never be naturally happy again.
Thus, it would be thirteen years before I finally saw a psychiatrist (even then, I had to be forced into it; the indoctrination runs deep) and started taking life-altering meds that allow me to function.
How John MacArthur opened my eyes to the failings of organized religion
University provided just enough of an escape, or so I believed at first. Through an abundance of caution, my mother told me all about an on-campus fellowship at my new school I could join right away. Another mom from church had had a son who attended and spoke highly of it—an older boy my mom had often pointed to as a model of “good Christian.”
Little did we know, that church and fellowship would prove the nail in my fundamentalist coffin.
It was John MacArthur’s church, ironically called Grace Community Church.
For most people who know anything about the larger Protestant circles, MacArthur’s name either conjures up images of literal mouthpiece of God or severe spiritual abuse. For me, it was the latter, and his deserved notoriety for insulting and belittling other believers and pastors who do not adhere to his particular brand of doctrine trickled all the way down to the college leaders and students at the fellowship associated with his church.
Being a part of this—there’s no other word for it—cult for almost a year and a half did more damage to my faith than a lifetime of growing up in a fundamentalist church. It was fundamentalism dialed up to 100.
We young women were given explicit instructions to protect our purity (that ugly word again) and that of young men, by never wearing low-cut clothes, never talking with a boy alone, never chatting with a boy for too long, and never even saying things like “I need to take a shower,” because it may lead him to have impure thoughts. God forbid we talk about anything as normal as daily showers.
Once, after a regular lunch with my small group leader, she told me to be mindful of the way I dress because I currently was “not serving my brothers in Christ in a godly way” and being “a stumbling block.”
[Purity culture] expects women to be the gatekeepers of men’s purity of mind, heart, and body so that they do not sin.”
—Dr. Laura E. Anderson, When Religion Hurts You
Not only did we have to watch our behaviour, but our thoughts weren’t safe either. Now, this is true—sin is in the heart, which manifests as behaviour, but this is how it manifested in this fear-based environment:
Singing praise songs is typical in contemporary Protestant churches (even though MacArthur once said he’s sure heaven will only have orchestral and choral music). We students listened to a sermon about how if we weren’t fully engaged when singing the lyrics to God, we were guilty of taking the Lord’s name in vain, violating one of the ten commandments. Whether that is theologically accurate is up for interpretation.
Soon, I wasn’t only watching my actions, but also “taking every thought captive” (2 Corinthians 10:5), for out of the heart comes evil (Matthew 15:19).
Everything was a slippery slope. Tiny lapses would inevitably lead me on a downward path all the way to Satan’s bosom. I’d known of this throughout my upbringing, but here, the sense of urgency and danger escalated to fever pitch.
When I first joined a small group, we all had to give a testimony. I mentioned Rick Warren’s A Purpose-Driven Life having some influence on me—after which my leader pulled me aside to show me a video of John MacArthur analysing how the book was a false Gospel for making the cardinal sin of failing to mention—well, sin.1
Sin is a big deal in fundamentalist Protestant circles. Rick Warren failed to properly impress upon his reader the gravity of their utter depravity and risk of eternal damnation. For that, he was guilty of preaching a fantasy that would cause would-be believers straight into the fires of hell.
This sort of extreme reaction to deviances from what John MacArthur thought was correct theology (and oh, did we spend an awful lot of time going over what was “right theology”) showed up in other ways, too.
Not long after the start of the year, someone in my small group left. The leader said she was theologically confused and we should pray for her soul. Years later when I somehow reconnected with this “fallen sister,” I learned she merely followed a different denomination.
But here’s the thing. I followed it all, or tried to. For most of the first year, I tried—as I always had—to be the good Christian girl. Even though I didn’t understand why we had to go “fishing”—that is, walking up to random people around campus to tell them the gospel—instead of forming relationships first. Or why we had to go to two services on Sunday: John MacArthur’s sermon, and then the college sermon. Or why I was being pushed to engage with people in my “own year” when I had enough friends in other years and in my own year in other fellowships or back at home. Among many other requirements.
It wasn’t good enough.
Some interesting things happened during the transition from my freshman year at university to the second. First, my small group leader essentially punted me over to someone else. Once I was no longer in her charge, she had zero interest in keeping up a relationship with me. The shift from caring leader to indifference was jarring to me. Then, my application to be part of the worship team was rejected because said small group leader informed them I was not spiritually mature enough. Apparently I’d missed too many small group meetings and skipped too much church (because 7AM to 12PM was just too much church and peopling for me, sorry), so I didn’t prioritise my spiritual life.
When the tower came crashing down
Dr. Anderson writes, “People do not leave high control religions simply because they are bored or because they disagree with one thing. Many of the people leaving these groups were some of the most committed and devoted individuals and have painstakingly reached conclusions that led them out of their church, denomination, or faith entirely.”
There was another traumatic incident unrelated to church that I won’t share here, but also occurred around the same time which also became the final straw that toppled the tower.
A lifetime of effort left me in nothing but ruins and disillusionment.
The thing is, from the moment I prayed for Jesus to save me at the tender age of five, I loved Him. At every stage of my life, I nurtured a genuine desire to know Him. I had a rich devotional life. Waking up before the crack of dawn to spend over an hour praying and reading my Bible wasn’t a chore for me—it was soul-filling.
I possessed a cognitive understanding of God’s love, and believed in it up until that point. However, I knew I wasn’t experiencing it through His people. I communed with God, sensed His presence, believed He spoke to me in return.
The traumatic incident altered my perception because for the first time, I felt He was utterly silent.
I faced a truth many who have walked a similar path face at some point: the system was designed so that I could never be good enough.
It was not about God or my relationship with Him. It was about control—keeping me small and compliant through shame, fear, and conditional acceptance. The churches I grew up in, the family that raised me, the church that broke me—these communities claiming to demonstrate God’s unconditional love had shown me time and time again that their love was, in fact, very conditional.
When I declared myself no longer a Christian that day in my mom’s Nissan Sentra, it wasn’t just a rejection of faith. It was an act of self-preservation, a culmination of years of trying to cut off parts of myself so I could fit into a mold never designed to hold all of me—my questions, my wildness, my deep well of grief, my mental health problems.
I no longer wanted to be part of a global church “community” that treated professed every human imago dei (image of God) then spat in the faces of those who did not conform to rigid man-made rules.
I no longer wanted to follow rules that made less and less sense to me, when the only answer anyone could give me was, “Because God said so.” By whose interpretation?
I no longer wanted to perform the intellectual somersaults to fill logical holes the Bible was littered with.
And I no longer wanted to believe in a God who had seemingly turned His back on me when I needed him the most, who remained silent. Me, and countless other victims who’d suffered trauma—including the teenage girl who had been found murdered in my hometown during the time I wrestled with these questions. What kind of God allowed such things?
I concluded He either wasn’t the kind who loved His creation, or He didn’t exist. Either way, I wanted nothing to do with it.
What I didn’t realise then was what I wrote in the beginning: deconstruction is only the beginning. Once you’re sitting in the rubble of the harmful structures you’ve pulled down around you, you still need to grieve the loss of the worldview and self you’ve known. You still need to clear the space for something new to grow—a faith built on true understanding of who God is and what it means to follow Him, not on fear and control.
But that is a story for another essay.
For now, I’ll say only this: if you’re in the midst of your own deconstruction, know that you’re not alone. The journey through that wilderness is necessary, even holy. And while I can’t promise what you’ll find on the other side, I can tell you that there is another side—one where you can breathe more freely, think more clearly, and perhaps even find a way to faith that holds you without diminishing you.
I don’t offer my story as a template for others to follow (everyone’s story is unique, after all), but rather as one voice in a conversation that deserves more honesty and nuance than it typically receives. Fundamentalism thrives in environments of certainty and simplicity. Perhaps the antidote lies in embracing the complexity of faith journeys—acknowledging that questions can be as sacred as answers, and that doubt might be not the enemy of faith but its necessary companion.
With Love,
About Me: I’m Tiffany, a literary fiction, fantasy, and memoir author. My writing has been published by The Cultivation Project and Renewal Missions. I’ve been writing this publication, The Untangling, since 2023. Order my books here or here.