Book Excerpt: 'My Fundamentalist Education'

Jan. 3, 2006 — -- Christine Rosen's childhood in a Christian fundamentalist school had nothing to do with dangerous extremism.

She said it wasn't perfect, but she looks back on her youth with fondness, even if most people she grew up with took the Bible literally.

Her memoir focuses on the 13 years she spent in Florida, where God's power and wrath steeped everything in a holy shroud that she didn't always understand.

You can read a chapter from the book "My Fundamentalist Education" below.

Statement of faith number 4:"We believe in the fallen and lost estate of man,whose total depravity makes necessary the new birth."

The short drive from our house on Jungle Avenue to Keswick Christian School took us over a causeway, where pelicans perched, past an old cement factory and the Veterans' Park, and along a stretch of neighborhood called the Colonial Village.

Like many subdivisions in the area, it attempted a hopeful façade, with a brick wall and worn, Colonial-looking signage marking the entrance. But if the sign was to be believed, the early American settlers lived in row after aluminum row of mobile homes.

As we pulled into the school on the first day, you could hear the crunch of our van's tires on the main driveway, a pothole-riddled composite of sand and the crushed remains of seashells. I noticed the playground first, and it seemed promising -- a fabulous, sandy expanse with large, half-buried truck tires, monkey bars, and a jungle gym from which a child was dangling, like a piece of overripe fruit, ready to drop to the sand below. There were swing sets that seemed to go on forever, with rusty chains and wooden seats that looked like they would leave splinters and flaking red paint on the back of your thighs. I wanted to run over and climb up the large metal ladder that was stuck into the ground and leap off of it until my feet stung. Next to the playground was an old log cabin, looking slightly worn, and a collection of low-slung, cream-colored concrete-block buildings with jalousie windows. Oak trees weighted with the gray, dripping density of Spanish moss dotted the grounds.

The other cars pulling into the driveway weren't fancy, but many of them had "God Is My Copilot!" and "Jesus Saves!" bumper stickers or strange little fish symbols affixed to them. Another van was parked in front of us, and a stream of little people were emerging from it: one, two, three, four, five, six children in all, and all with the same striking white-blond hair. Barreling in behind us was a white Cutlass Supreme, from which only one child emerged, a skinny girl with dirty-blond hair, about Cathy's age, who looked mildly embarrassed as she pulled her book bag out of the backseat. The woman in the driver's seat had dangly earrings and teased hair and was talking to the girl, who said, "Okay, Mom, I know!" a few times before slamming the car door and hurrying toward her classroom. As the Cutlass turned to head back out of the school gates, I saw that it, too, had a bumper sticker: "If you're rich, I'm single!"

Even I could sense that first day that Keswick was a place flirting with financial insolvency. The high-pitched whine and crackle of the intercom that startled me that morning brought the principal's voice, which welcomed us to our first day of school, then encouraged families to purchase Burger King coupons; a portion of the sales benefited the Parent Teacher Association.

"You can use your coupons for an occasional evening out," he urged, and the school would get 50 cents of every dollar spent on greasy burgers and fries. "Remember BK!" my teacher enthusiastically reminded us every day thereafter. We went home that week with flyers pinned to our shirts urging Keswick families to consume large quantities of V8 juice and Franco-American gravies, so that the labels from the cans could be steamed off and redeemed by the school for cheaply made audiovisual equipment; soon Cathy and I were sending our own sodden stack of tomato and cream-of mushroom soup labels by the kitchen sink at home.

The school had taken its name from a holiness movement that originated in Keswick, the principal town in England's Lake District, in the late nineteenth century. The Keswick faithful's defining tenets were separatism and outward markers of piety, a worldview that required a "strenuous and visible morality," as one historian described it. The school was affiliated with the Moody Bible Institute, one of America's oldest fundamentalist Protestant institutions, based in Chicago, which has trained generations of missionaries, ministers, and Christian educators since its founding in 1886. Moody added to separation from the world a corresponding commitment to winning souls to Christ. "I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel," Dwight L. Moody once said of this form of evangelism. "God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, 'Moody, save all you can!'"

Keswick began not as a lifeboat but as a thirteen-acre chicken farm -- a dilapidated property containing little more than oak trees, some diseased citrus, that very log cabin next to the playground, covered in tongue-in-groove cypress, and a garage, where the owner housed the more aggressive birds he used for cockfighting.

In 1953, a recently widowed mother of two children named Ruth Munce bought the property, hoping to transform it into a private school where "God would be the sum of the equation, the Bible a textbook." The chicken house became the senior classroom, the log cabin the lower school, and the Grace Livingston Hill Memorial School was born.

Munce was Christian royalty of a sort; her mother, for whom she named the school, was the woman who pioneered the Christian romance novel and wrote more than one hundred of them before her death in 1947. Ruth Munce, writing under the name Ruth Livingston Hill, was known to have kept the fledgling Memorial school afloat by publishing her own Christian romances, earnest salutations with titles such as Morning Is for Joy and The Jeweled Sword. The school grew modestly during the 1960s and 1970s, and in 1978, just about the time I arrived to begin my first day of school, it became part of the Moody Bible Institute and changed its name to Keswick Christian School.