Over the past decade, Canadian journalist Brett Grainger has written about religion and politics for a variety of magazines, newspapers, and public radio. Formerly a producer for NPR, he was an editor at Sojourners and Elm Street magazine and has written for The Globe and Mail, National Post, Shift, and Canadian Geographic, amongst others. In 2006, he received a Gold medal from the National Magazine Awards for a profile of poverty in Muskoka written for Toronto Life.

Raised in a small community of Plymouth Brethren in Huntsville, Ontario, Brett’s new book IN THE WORLD BUT NOT OF IT: One Family’s Militant Faith and the History of Fundamentalism in America is an examination of Christian fundamentalism in Canada and the United States coloured with his own personal experiences in a religious family.

Brett now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so after a talking on the phone, we conducted this Q & A over email.

When did you start to question your family’s beliefs? 

I don’t remember any particular dark night of the soul. Certainly as I got older, I began to encounter ideas, especially in high-school English classes, that were directly counter to what I’d been raised to think about the world. I remember being in Sunday school as a teenager. My teacher was this incredibly sweet middle-aged guy who worked in a factory. Real salt-of-the-earth type. One day he brought in some literature for us on how the earth had been created 10,000 years ago in seven literal days. He wasn’t belligerent, and he didn’t try to tell us that evolution was the source of all the evils in the world. He simply and genuinely believed he could give us a solid, persuasive, rational defence for creationism. But by that time, I’d already studied evolution in biology class, and I remember thinking, “Well, it’s a little too late for this.”

Why did you decide to revisit religious extremism for a book?

My sense was there are very few books that attempt a sympathetic critique of fundamentalism. Most of them are written by people who have axes to grind. Most reduce fundamentalism to a kind of political strategy. But the fundamentalists I grew around had absolutely no designs on government. They didn’t even believe a Christian should vote. They just want to be left alone. So there is this tremendous diversity that I wanted to communicate—that fundamentalism is not a monolith but is incredibly diverse and pluralistic, just like modern liberal society as a whole.

How would define Christian fundamentalism?

Someone once said a fundamentalist is “an evangelical who is angry about something,” and I think that’s true. It’s not so much a unique set of beliefs as it is an orientation, an attitude of belligerence or defiance toward certain aspects of modernity. It used to be a compliment to call someone a fundamentalist. It meant you were committed to fighting to protect the “fundamentals of the faith”—traditional Christian doctrines like the virgin birth and the divinity of Christ. Then in 1925, fundamentalists prosecuted a biology teacher named Scopes for teaching evolution in Tennessee, and public opinion suddenly turned against them. Fundamentalism became a synonym for ignorance and bigotry. Most fundamentalists these days prefer the more generic term, “evangelical.” Even so, I think the word is still useful in distinguishing between mainstream evangelicals, who are generally comfortable living “in the world,” and fundamentalists, who define themselves largely in opposition to mainstream secular culture.

Don’t all Christian fundamentalists believe the same thing?

A major point I wanted to make in this book is that fundamentalism isn’t a cultural monolith. For a long time it has been presented this way in the media—and by believers themselves. In fact, it is an incredibly diverse movement: it’s highly decentralized, bound by no creeds, bureaucracies, or authorities outside the Bible, and in a constant process of change. When you imagine the stereotype of a Christian fundamentalist, the image that most likely comes to mind is the pastor of some megachurch in the American south, where the sermon sounds like a stump speech for the Republican Party. You know the churches that are so big they have their own movie theatres and hold services with a full band on stage--it’s like going to a rock concert. But my experience of fundamentalism couldn’t have been more different. When we read the same King James Bible, we came to the conclusion that God didn’t want us to participate in politics—no one ever voted—or watch movies. It was even forbidden to use musical instruments in church. Defining and defending the “fundamentals” never means the same thing to two believers.

How widespread is Christian fundamentalism in Canada?

I think Canadian evangelicals are warier to identify themselves as fundamentalists. But when you ask Canadian evangelicals to spell out the content of their beliefs, much of what they’ll tell out lines up identically with the content of fundamentalist faith. I’m thinking of a pessimistic view of history, a belief in the “rapture,” a tendency to view every word in the Bible as “literally” true and inerrant, a defensive attitude to secular culture. Just because they’re not out there picketing abortion clinics doesn’t mean they aren’t fundamentalists.

Who is George Bothwell?

George is an organic farmer who lives in Owen Sound. In the 1980s, the Ontario government introduced new driver’s licenses that made use of digital imagery. George had been reading the book of Revelation, in which there’s a passage about an Antichrist figure who will force everyone in the world to give or receive some kind of mark on their face and hand. George got it into his mind that this verse was talking about biometrics—the new technology that uses things like facial-recognition software and fingerprint and retinal scans to identify people. So he refused to get his picture taken, and he spent over $100,000 in court fighting the government for an exemption, which he was denied. George is a great example of the Protestant principle of “sola scriptura,” which means “by scripture alone.” He thinks he doesn’t need a church or a minister to discern God’s will—he has everything he needs in the Bible. A basic principle of fundamentalism is this notion that any human being can pick up the Bible and interpret it simply by applying their common sense. And I think there’s a sense in which that’s true. But there’s also a sense in which that is disastrous. George also illustrates the complex and ambivalent relationship fundamentalists have with technology. George is not a Luddite—he uses computers and drives a car. But he appropriates technology selectively, based on how it will be used. That’s a good way of showing how fundamentalists approach modernity as a whole—they aren’t anti-modern, though they’re often described that way. They represent an alternate modernity, a different way of being modern.

Read part two of our Q & A with Brett Grainger tomorrow!