Customer Reviews

In the World but Not of It: One Family's Militant Faith and the History of Fundamentalism in America

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I highly recommend Brett Grainger's first book. It is a most intelligent and compassionate work based on experience and thorough research. So much writing has been done on the subject of fundamentalism filled with either disdain or uncritical praise neither of which brings much illumination to the subject. Grainger manages both sympathy and critique with insight and humor. One senses that he has no axes to grind merely revelations to make. The product is simply wonderful. Grainger's book works as both memoir and expose (meant here in the best since of the term).

It is indeed a shame that John Stackhouse found the book mean spirited. I do not share the same perspective. Grainger's reflections are an authentic look and self-portrait of his experience. His connections are in personal and cultural insight and open a space for more questions. Stackhouse's "so what" may not be of interest to him as they are to me. His dismissive attitude, especially clothed in "scholarly critique" leave me wondering if he understands the value of personal narrative to some readership populations. Prompting continued questions about a powerful American religious and political culture are never "Ho-Hum". We are saturated with the unquestioned influence of popularly packaged and staged religious beliefs that fail to address the greater complexity of individual lives lived.

I found Grainger's writing to welcome readers into an excerpt of his personal narrative. The research text was both helpful and appropriate, given the compactness of his book. There were many meaningful themes, questions and thoughts addressed or suggested that speak to the human condition and human heart. I particularly valued the notions of our human responses to the uncertainties in life and the desire to hold onto beliefs for comfort, hope and rescue from the cruelties of our culture and society, whichever the decade and place.

I identified a fellow traveler seeking to live an integrated life in a world that would readily pull us in only one direction/interpretation (pick one of many), thereby neglecting the more difficult task of understanding complexity of being human in a personal, family, and societal context.

This is an excellent book for anyone curious about what fundamentalism means to fundamentalists, and to our country. The most compelling point Grainger makes is that fundamentalism isn't a monolith, but a decentralized, multitudinous movement that gives expression to a fascinatingly wide range of beliefs and practices.

Grainger weaves together his personal experiences with fundamentalism with sharp, vivid reporting on various fundamentalist groups across the States. He strikes a graceful balance between the personal and the objective - he has the hard-won sympathy of someone who grew up with fundamentalism and left it behind, without losing his fascination with what fundamentalism means to other people.

The book is slim and beautifully written - an excellent, fair minded introduction to a charged topic. Fundamentalism is as powerful a force in our culture as you may think, but not in the stereotyped ways outsiders tend to believe in. Grainger's engaging discussion of 'creation science' alone makes the book worth reading, but you will also come away with a vivid insider's stories - his and others' - of one of the most misunderstood forces in our culture.

The Plymouth Brethren are indeed a fascinating group, with influence in North American and worldwide Christianity out of all proportion to their small numbers. They deserve more considered reflection than they have received heretofore, and a memoir informed by scholarship indeed would be an excellent mode of such reflection.

Alas, Brett Grainger's book is an almost total failure.

He demonstrates only an elementary academic acquaintance with American fundamentalism and none with the Canadian fundamentalism or the Christian/Plymouth Brethren movement that are the focus of his memoir.

Recollections of incidents in his own family and his various vignettes of American fundamentalist institutions portray the spectacular extremes, not the actual normal existence, of most fundamentalists. (He does occasionally consider daily life and he is at his best when simply depicting the quotidian.)

Grainger is also mean-spirited in this book, and that's a shame. His undeniable gift for the catchy phrase frequently makes him look merely clever and sarcastic rather than acute and articulate. For instance upon his conversion, "My grandmother stood at my side, showing me off as if I were a prize pumpkin at a fair." Yet he gives us no reason to see his grandmother in this cynical way, and he seems otherwise to quite like and respect her.

Most disappointing of all, he connects the memoir with the academic context only in the most superficial ways, offering nothing in the way of actual insight. So what if the Brethren believe in creationism and there is a big creationism movement in the U.S.? So what if Brethren have been fascinated by the Tabernacle and American fundamentalists support the state of Israel? At the end, one wonders, What does all this mean? What new, interesting thing does any of this actually tell us about the true nature of the Brethren, or American fundamentalism, or the Grainger family, or anything?

The book comes off half-baked at best, and Grainger's publisher did him no service in bringing this to print without asking him to read and think a lot more about what all these bits and pieces might signify. We await the book this one promises to be.