Customer Reviews

Bible Believers

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an intelligent, well written book that conveys how Fundamentalists structure their lives and what their world view is. It was just perfect for my interest as a psychotherapist who is trying to understand this mindset in a client. The writing style is analytical without being ponderously academic, dry or theoretical. It is also extremely even-handed, neither favoring not condemning a mindset but rather just describing how Fundamentalists make sense of the world and what measures they take to maintain their beliefs in the face of the larger secular society. It assumes no religious bias on the part of the reader, which I find intelligent and refreshing. For me, it clarified in accessible, dispassionate terms what the (psychological) benefits of membership are, as well as the (psychological) sacrifices and limitations which membership imposes.

This is a good book, and I recommend it, but it's not perfect. Although Ammerman did a lot of ethnographic work, it seems like she relies mostly on interview material rather than direct observation, and that was sort of frustrating. I have to assume that if what she was told by her subjects had contradicted what she saw, she would have said so, but I still found myself wishing I had a clearer picture of daily life in the congregation. Still, I don't know of a better book on the same subject -- that such a good book as this has these limitations only shows how difficult a subject it was to tackle.

I had Ammerman as a professor years ago. She knows the wherefore of which she speaks, having grown up in this background. The fact she can write about it with a fair hand, a *neutral* hand, says a lot about her grasp of cultural relativism. But it also gives her a unique insight as to exactly what makes these communities tick (and more largely, what drives Fundamentalism itself, as a worldview.)