Safe Deposit But No Return
My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood
by Christine Rosen
PublicAffairs, 2005
(231 pages, $24.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Dave Andrusko
Years ago, when it came time to enroll my oldest in middle school, I’d like to say that I weighed the pros and cons in a fashion that made Solomon look like an impulse shopper. Truth be told, I drove by my neighborhood public school, chiseled out absurd conclusions from a mini-quarry of inadequate information, and, in a quasi-panic, enrolled my daughter in a fundamentalist Christian school for safekeeping.
In many ways, that school was very much like Keswick Christian School, lovingly described by Christine Rosen in My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Childhood. In retrospect, I realize that I labored under the same ill-informed stereotypes about public schools that many people carry around about “fundamentalist” schools.
To be sure, some graduates of schools like Keswick emerge with enough baggage to fill an airport carousel. Others barely need to open an overhead bin. Christine Rosen falls into a third category: She thrived.
That Feeling
Rosen’s dad and stepmother chose Keswick largely because the public school she and her sister Cathy would have attended was in a part of town “where everyone had bars on their windows and commercial activity was limited to pawnshops and liquor stores.”
So why such a decidedly unacademic book from the author of the very well-received Preaching Eugenics, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., who also serves as senior editor of The New Atlantis and whose byline crops up in places as far apart as The Weekly Standard, The New York Times Magazine, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Commonweal?
In an interview given after the book was published, Rosen said that when she and her Jewish husband-to-be were dating, his mother told Rosen, “You know, it would just be my worst fear if my son married a Southern Christian fundamentalist.”
“I was raised a Southern Christian fundamentalist,” she calmly told her future mother-in-law, who was appalled by what she had just said. Rosen assured her that she could understand “why you have that feeling” and offered to have a chat.
In many ways that’s what this book is: a chat that helps disabuse the typical reader of some of the worst boilerplate shibboleths. For example, Rosen tells us that “reason and faith developed together” at Keswick. Counter to the conventional wisdom, the guidance that came from Scripture “taught me to examine, to question, to criticize—even if this questioning eventually led me away from fundamentalism.”
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