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In the late 1980s, while I was writing Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, someone named Richard Yao was all the rage. Yao had founded a group called Fundamentalists Anonymous, and to hear him tell it fundamentalism—a term that was thrown about loosely then just as it is now—constituted a threat to mental health and was responsible for every malady imaginable, from bunions to the national debt.

A fundamentalist childhood has become a hot commodity on the literary market. Memoirs like Born Again and Again, by Jon M. Sweeney; My Fundamentalist Education, by Christine Rosen; and Frank Schaeffer’s much discussed Crazy for God, about his childhood at L’Abri Fellowship and involvement in the religious right, have given readers a glimpse into the world of fundamentalist Christianity.