127 thoughts on “A Very UnScientific Survey”

  9. Sorry, I never had the honor (?) of attending a Fundy college or university. But I did work in a fundy Baptist summer camp between my high school and college years.

    2. Ugh…Never attended one, but was SURROUNDED by people who did…I think PCC was considered the more LIBERAL school, that and Liberty in VA….so people would go there to have a Christian “party” time…. ha!!!! I always wondered why they just didn’t go to a state University…. Oh, no…wait… Mommy and Daddy wouldn’t allow that cause Pastor X wouldn’t approve…forgot that one.
      My husband went to a state school and he’s a ton more Godly than any of those Christian Fundy guys turned out. he he…
      He doesn’t even wear a -Gulp- tie to church and he’s a DEACON !!! : )

    3. Been there, done that.
      I think I lived that whole summer in a denim skirt. We were actually allowed to have slits….
      Try climbing hills in one of those things!!

  11. What about a “not married” option for the consensual sex question? Not all of us ran off and got hitched immediately following graduation!

        1. Yes, but a few years ago they abandoned their IFB roots and became SBC. They recently announced plans to move to the campus of a local Southern Baptist church. Highland Park Baptist Church, which started the school, has changed its name and moved to the ‘burbs.

  15. I usually ignore surveys, but took this one. The part, or “school” of the Fundy U I attended no longer exists, though.

    Since I went to two, should I take the survey again, once for each? (even though #2 isn’t listed, )

      3. Just use a different browser, I’d imagine. Or clear your cookies and reload the page.

        I never went to a fundy U, so I can’t test it out…

    1. Well, no. But I went to grad school. And no, my FU piece of paper didn’t help at all. I got in because I had good test scores and because the VP of my (Fortune500) company wrote me an endorsement letter. I was still on academic probation until the end of the first term, though.

    3. I went to grad school, but only on the basis of my having worked 12 years in my field first. And when I graduated, I had to wait inordinately long for my license because George Fox U. had to write some sort of document vouching for my missing under grad degree.

    4. Yes, I would have liked something like that too, along with an “other” option for the job. I started to get an education degree. I am now working an office job to pay for school at a real university, to get a real education degree. So no, my job isn’t directly related to my FU degree, but it will be. I suppose I’m more of an exception since I’m still in college.

  19. I didn’t finish at Fundy U and never got a ‘real’ degree (go ahead and judge me. I can take it). Husband didn’t finish there either but he later went to a secular school and received a Bachelors in Business Administration.

  20. I wonder how many of us that are not drinking would say we have moved beyond the point of thinking it is wrong….we just don’t have taste for it, have nasty drunks in our past, just don’t want to mess with it, whatever….

    1. I prefer to think of it as stubbornness on my part, although it’s also true that I can’t get past the smell of most alcohol, and I just don’t care for the drinking scene, etc.

    2. I don’t believe it is wrong any longer (though my daughter does!). But as a diabetic, I have to be careful about those liquid calories. I never did develop a taste for beer or wine.

      But other than the fact that I can’t drink more than a sip or so, I have no problems with my friends doing so. Provided they aren’t obnoxiously drunk or something.

      Sigh. It wouldn’t matter how drunk a friend was, I would never “look good” to fool around with. Not that anything would happen if they did think of it — I would be too scared to even try.

  21. I wonder how long it is before this survey is used to talk about how very evil and reprobate and wicked we all are.

        1. Alcohol consumption
          Haven’t been to church since 2007
          Won’t listen to any Christian music unless it’s at least 1,000 years old
          Am pro-gay marriage
          Am a Universalist
          I have Islamic friends
          Am a Democrat

          There’s probably more if I gave it more thought…

      2. Do you know why it is difficult for an Episcopalian to become a lawyer?

        Because it’s very hard to pass the bar.

        ;-]

  23. I remember a Fundy pastor’s wife 40 plus years ago who wouldn’t let her 19 year old son come home because he had grown a mustache. No kidding. He didn’t have long hair or tattoos or piercings or smoke pot or wear blue jeans or wire-rim glasses or listen to rock music or use a non-KJV Bible or chew tobacco or drink alcohol or go to movies or go out in public without a suit and tie or work on Sunday or own a TV or withhold 10% off his net instead of his gross income or miss a meal without saying grace or exaggerate or have sideburns below the middle of his ears or use the words gee and golly or:

    (Please Fill in the Blanks Below)
    _______________
    _______________
    _______________
    _______________
    _______________
    _______________
    _______________
    _______________
    _______________
    _______________
    _______________
    _______________
    _______________
    _______________
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    _______________
    _______________

    He DID have a well-manicured mustache and that was enough to make him stay away. I was a new Christian and decided to run off and go to Pillsbury Baptist Bible College. He told me that his mother asked him why he didn’t want to go to PBBC like Former Funny Mentalist (not my real name 🙂 🙂 :-))

    His mother told me what he said to her: “Why would I leave one prison camp just to go into another?”

    Oh what would his mother had done if The Lord have been standing outside her door asking to come in?

    I told you all I have a lot of stories to tell. Unfortunately this is all REAL stuff I experienced.

      1. Dear BJg,
        Thank you. I look forward to unloading this garbage with readers who understand and appreciate what I have to say. It’s a whole lot cheaper than paying for therapy. I have a LOT more stories. I spent a number of years on a misguided personal agenda to discredit the IFB I was so bitter and angry.
        I have been relieved if that burdensome task as the Fundies are doing a fine job without my help.
        The Independent Fundamental Militant Separated Baptist movement is NOT OF GOD.
        I hope to unload many more personal accounts in the hope that anyone who frequents this site out of morbid curiosity, a need to have their wounded feelings validated or are seriously thinking of getting into or out if the IFB.
        I know I have shared some stories that have disturbed some because of the cruelty I endured by the IFB.
        Our Lord is aware of what is going on. His Grace and healing is available. He also allows His own to suffer as it makes us sensitive to those who are hurting.
        Enough for now.

    2. If that woman had started obeying Jesus and caring for the needy around her, instead of focusing on following rules, she soon would have found that she wouldn’t have time to meltdown over a moustache.

      1. Exactly!
        My parents worked at an IFB place that wouldn’t allow men to have mustaches…
        I grew up thinking it was a sin.
        Thought if a guy’s hair touched his ears he was “backslidden” too.
        Sad
        So
        Sad….

        1. 1 Sam 16:7 (unofficial fundy version) “…. man looks on the outward appearance, and so does God”

  24. I took it! I was very surprised to see Northland up here as an option. It is my college and while it used to be a fundy haven and still identifies with the name, it can hardly be called a fundy college anymore. Many of our fundy supporters have turned their backs on us because of our “backslidden” ways. If anything, Maranatha should be up there as pillar fundy truth. Our rival school was very willing to take on our former supporters by increasing its rules and “standards”, in other words keeping their students under lock and skirt clad key!

    1. Turned their backs….
      Yep
      That’s how I remember the IFB’s…
      Always turning their backs on fellow Christians
      Cult, I say! Cult!!

    2. Oh, I don’t know. My son went to Northland not too long ago (about 3 years). It wasn’t white shirt and tie, but it was fundy in the ways that counted the most.

      1. I started going 3 years ago, right when the changes started to hit. You should visit campus now! Not the fundy school it used to be, and so much better for it. It’s amazing how gospel focused the school is, now that they’ve lessened their “standards”!

    3. Yes, Maranatha saw an opportunity, flexed its fundamentalist muscles and gathered a crop of “like-minded” students and at least one new faculty member. Of course, like-minded and narrow minded go hand in hand. I’m any gains by Maranatha will be short lived, as this kind of narrow minded thinking is quickly fading away, even though it’s alive and well in some places.

  26. I see the results are posted. Where are the results for the questions that were answered “Other (please specify)”
    I mean, what other possible choices for alcohol consumption is there other than Never, Occasionally, or Regularly?

  29. Don’t mean to change the subject, but the question about consensual sex before marriage brought to mind and old Baptist joke:
    Q. Why don’t Baptists have sex standing up?
    A. Because it might lead to dancing 🙂

  30. CONTEXT: When Canterbury Tales was written about the debauched lifestyles of clergy in the Roman Catholic church, the church made little or no response. They admitted, in fact, that there was licentious living in their ranks. The reason they took little offense was because the book attacked their personal foibles. Who doesn’t have them? Look anywhere and they are there — they are part of humanity wherever it is engaged.

    When Wycliffe started to publish scripture in English and the Lollards started to show what scripture said regarding RC church doctrine and practice., the church hunted him down and were so angry that, having found him only after he died, dug him up, burned his corpse and scattered his ashes. They burned Tyndale and others with equal fury. The reason the RC church DID take serious offense at these publications were because they attacked the very foundation of the church’s position: the basis for the authority with which they spoke, the engine for their influence, even their existence.

    COMMENT: I think this survey is a really bad idea. It has a number of genuinely corrosive consequences. Because it is a highly focused and sensitive set of questions delivered to an audience that is already self-selected, the results are statistically meaningless. The results will likely generate pride in that audience by confirming what they already think: the fundies are some combination of hypocritical and ineffective. Finally, it feeds cynicism about religious practice in general.

    The worst effect of publishing results of this survey, however, is that they will be the Canterbury Tales, writ small, of the battle over true authority for how to live. It doesn’t matter if people who went to these colleges don’t practice a certain lifestyle. It tells us nothing of its actual truth. Surveys show nobody flosses regularly but we don’t use that survey to criticize the “you should floss” preachers. The survey approach blurs the line between “what is” and “what should be.”

    Results will, ironically, embolden both sides: the cynics are confirmed in their cynicism and the puritans are confirmed that they hold the moral high ground based on the debauchery of their critics.

    Hypocrisy and ineffectual instruction are everywhere and showing they reside among fundies is at best a waste of time and at worst a serious distraction from a more serious attack of the foundations they claim for their abusive, oppressive and corrupting intrusions into the lives of young and vulnerable lives.

    One vote for the proposition that the results should not be published.

    1. Carson,
      I think it depends on Darrell’s purpose for this survey. If it were for any reason other than to “satisfy (his) curiosity,” then perhaps your caution would be warranted.

    2. I floss twice a day. I have a fortune in my teeth since I was neglected as a child. I also married the ONLY girl I kissed. We are working on 42 years of being married. I was taught that girls were something to use growing up.
      This survey was not a waste of time to me unless I don’t count. I was a squeaky clean young man till I got chewed up and spit out by the Fundies. My great personable foibles were deep bitterness and anger at the IFB cult.
      False teaching hides behind the woodwork like cockroaches.
      That’s my 2-cents :-/

    3. If you read the BJU handbook (a facebook group is posting it bit by bit for public perusal) you’ll see that they are PROMISING students’ parents that if their kids come to BJU and follow BJU’s horrible rules, those students will be godly (by BJU’s standards, not God’s) adults who will never stray from the fundy rules.

      When you start off with that false teaching, it is absolutely appropriate to show that those students who go to BJU end up making perfectly reasonable decisions that would shock current BJU students’ parents. The BJU methodology does not do what BJU claims it does.

      And I’m focusing on BJU because I’ve been reading parts of its handbook recently.

    4. I am not emboldened. I realize that the stats mean nothing because it is a self-selected population. Personally, I am interested in the results because it gives a slightly clearer picture of the folks here. I didn’t realize so many were BoJo folks, for instance.

    1. This survey doesn’t really “prove” anything because the sample is clearly skewed towards the people who read this blog and their ilk.

      What we can say is that it looks like SFL readers (of the kind who would be willing to take this survey) are pretty much reflective of the rest of the population in terms of drinking, music, income, and so on.

      In other words: “the kids are all right.” My feeling from looking at the results Fundy U did most of us no real lasting harm overall. And that’s encouraging.

  33. Hello, I’ve been poring through your archives (including the comments) in an effort to understand the IFB movement, which I have no particular connection to, although I did grow up in Texas. My compliments on a very informative site!

    The universities were a complete unknown to me–I only knew of the relatively mainstream ones like Baylor or TCU. Am I right in understanding that we are dealing with a dozen or fewer IFB colleges in the USA? I thought there were many more–potentially hundreds more–but the quasi-denominational distinctions still bewilder me. Or perhaps only a few of them are very large…?

    I also wish I knew more about the IBF movement in other countries, especially the anglophone world. In Taiwan (where I live) there are six Protestant universities, one of which (Christ’s College in Danshui) might be considered comparable, although it is not Baptist. It only has a few hundred students, partly because it only received recognition from the Ministry of Education quite recently, and its future is profoundly uncertain.

    One thing I notice is that the survey results so far seem broadly favorable to the Bible colleges, in that their administrators would probably view these numbers with pride and satisfaction. Salaries seem reasonable, marriages are relatively successful (at least in the sense that they did not end in divorce), and more than 90 percent retain their faith (although I would be interested to know how many have left IFB for some other denomination or grouping). This is not at all what I would have guessed.

    In answer to the question above, Union Bible College is a conservative Holiness college, which would indicate a different theology (Wesleyan).

    1. The IFB (or IBF for our Canadian friends) churches are a very distinct subset of Baptists here. They do indeed have less than a dozen or so major colleges although many churches will start their own “church basement” bible college or bible school usually with only a few unaccredited degrees in ministry-related fields.

      As for administrators liking the results of the survey, the questions on music, drinking, and premarital sex would negate all the other results in their minds. They would also what to know “what kind” of Christian people are because non-Baptists really don’t count in their view.

      There really aren’t too many colleges outside the US like the IFB schools here although missionary efforts such as the Hyles-Anderson college of West Africa (http://www.stufffundieslike.com/2014/04/the-white-man-in-the-suit/) are underway.

      1. Thank you! Is Lubbock Christian University a different grouping, then? (My friend was evangelized by them in Greece.)

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