The Year of Learning Dangerously by Quinn Cummings

Author:Quinn Cummings [Cummings, Quinn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101610718
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2012-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

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Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses.

—1 TIMOTHY 6:12

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So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded.

—JOSHUA 10:40

She liked that last one especially, noting that as Christians, “We have to stop leaving our enemies breathing.” I looked around at the roomful of people quietly listening and taking notes. I like breathing, and I was fairly sure I was the closest thing to an enemy in the room. I inched down lower in my seat.

As the conference wore on, I began to get the prickly sensation of being followed. The United Nations is taking our kids. The U.S. government is taking our rights. Swedish death metal bands are taking all the best names. One lecturer warned that our churches were losing their vigor. Another told us we had to build a wall around our families before we trained them up. This wall, however, was probably irrelevant because at least three books on sale at the conference lamented how too many homeschooled Christians left the church by adulthood.

Even here, there seemed to be some confusion. One book had this attrition at 67 percent, another at 71 percent and a third at 80 percent. Nor was there consensus about what “leaving the church” actually entailed. Did it mean drifting toward a less Fundamentalist congregation? Changing your name to Muhammad? Setting foot in Abercrombie & Fitch? Whichever exit one took, there was general agreement that an unsettling proportion of Christian homeschool graduates were taking up cupcakes instead of arms. We must try our best and pray for strength, the general feeling went, but it doesn’t matter because we’re losing and the game’s almost over.

Which was remarkable because these people had won a great victory in the very recent past. They were the reason homeschooling even officially existed in the United States. In the early 1980s, a coalition of Christian conservatives started to lobby in each state for legislation that made homeschooling legal in all fifty states, and by the middle of the 1990s they had succeeded. Yet they still didn’t believe they had separated far enough from the tainted society they feared and so eagerly rejected. To their thinking, Big Government was still trying to break up their families, popular culture still held their beliefs in contempt and a global conspiracy of atheists and fervent anti-Christians continued to thwart their mission to satisfy God’s directives. By the end of my first day as a pretend Fundamentalist, I realized that these people—burdened by the weight of their convictions, not to mention their modest clothing—were even gloomier than I was. And while I only had a vague sense of unease, they had Revelations to back them up.

So the plan now was to separate even further from the century that had sprung up all around them like a flood.

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