That’s the metaphor used by this reader in describing the biggest religious decision of her life:

I’m 35 and was raised in a very extreme, conservative Christian environment. My parents homeschooled me all the way through high school, mostly so that they could control what I learned about the world and about  religion. This means that I spent all of my life until the age of 18 or so being not only intensively indoctrinated, but also incredibly isolated from the outside world.

Virtually everyone I interacted with believed in “scientific creationism,” as we called it, and in my history books I learned about Manifest Destiny and God’s glorious plan for America. I also learned, both at home and at church, that as a woman I needed to submit to the men in my life, and that God’s best for me was to stay at home and raise a large family.

Undoing the brainwashing took a long time. It wasn’t until about a year ago that I made my biggest religious choice: atheism!

It was a decision for freedom, but still, leaving my religion (and acknowledging that I’d grown up in something closer to a tiny cult than a loving family) plunged me into a crisis. The loss of so many long-held beliefs and ways of looking at the world was so devastating that for a time, I needed therapy three times a week.

I know that many people practice a more liberal form of religion. But that’s not an option for me, at least not at this point. The extremist religion I was raised in did so much harm that I now feel allergic to any and all religious practice. Attending a (liberal) Christmas Eve service with my new boyfriend’s Catholic family brought on PTSD-like symptoms.

Sometimes I still look back wistfully to the days when I could cling to the knowledge that God had a plan and knew better than I did, no matter what happened. The world felt like a more secure place when I saw it in black-and-white terms and believed myself to be a child of the Creator.

But I don’t get too wistful, because I know that the security blanket of Christianity was actually smothering me. I am much happier now, in my secular life as a humanist. For the first time, I can breathe freely and think honestly. I no longer see myself as a worm with no worth apart from what Christ has given me. I no longer have to repent of each tiny mistake I make. I no longer live in fear of hell. I no longer need to twist my mind to accept things that are in fact illogical and unproven.

Unfortunately, I do still struggle with anger and bitterness and confusion and grief at the way I was raised. I don’t understand the choices my parents made.

That reader’s story reminds me of a similar one published in Patheos by Libby Anne, who was raised by conservative evangelical parents who homeschooled her in a kind of social separation from society increasingly known as “The Benedict Option,” a term popularized by the Orthodox Christian blogger Rod Dreher. The Benedict Option, formed mostly in response to the mainstream acceptance and full legalization of same-sex marriage, harkens back to the 5th century Saint Benedict of Nursia, who retreated from the decadence of Rome and formed an isolated group of monastic communities that sought to preserve Christianity through the Dark Ages. Today’s Ben Oppers are basically retreating from the culture wars, in contrast to the Moral Majority and other conservative religious groups seeking to shape national politics. (Laura Turner wrote a great piece for us last year on “what happens when the ‘moral majority’ becomes a minority.”)

For Libby Anne, her isolation from secular society had the opposite effect of what her parents intended; it led to her to abandon Christianity altogether, as well as a belief in any god. She explains:

The Christian homeschooling movement purports to raise strong, upstanding Christians who will, upon adulthood, be ready to communicate the truth of Christianity and the value of the Christian way of life to the world. The Benedict Option purports the same thing. But how is this supposed to happen if these same Christians grow up so shielded from the world that they have no idea how to interact with it? […]

There’s another problem, too. Growing up within Christian community, I only ever heard the other side’s arguments through a sort of filter. For example, I studied evolution out of creationist textbooks which explained evolution in an incomplete way and was full of straw men of evolutionary scientists’ positions. The same was true with basically everything. I didn’t hear the other side’s argument from the horse’s mouth, as it were, until I was in [a secular] college, and when I did I was surprised, because what the other side actually said didn’t line up with what I’d been taught it said. This created a crisis of faith, because I no longer felt I could trust what my parents had taught me.

Because what I call the Christian bubble filter is so common across congregations and communities, raising children under a more separate Benedict Option could potentially mean that all of their information about the world outside the bubble would be filtered and thus distorted. This is a problem because when they eventually hear something from someone outside of the bubble, unfiltered—the moment they meet an ordinary gay couple happily raising children, or learn that using entropy to argue against evolution fails on the most basic level—-it won’t line up with what they’d been told inside the bubble. And frankly, postponing this moment until adulthood spells trouble.

Trouble in the sense of rejecting religion altogether, rather than adopting a less rigid form of Christianity, one that’s integrated with mainstream society—bending rather than breaking, in other words. Or, as our reader put it, “The extremist religion I was raised in did so much harm that I now feel allergic to any and all religious practice.”

If you as a Christian want to know why fundamentalism in your own religion is so dangerous and needs to be defeated, this is why: It discredits Christianity itself by making it deny reality and encourage hatred, and it is promoted by dishonesty. I was able to fully recover from my brainwashing by attending Unitarian Universalist churches, but I also understand why most UUs do not insist that everyone should be with them. Still, it is an alternative for those who might benefit from it. For others, at least in the United States there can be this: