I’ve been corresponding with a reader, a Millennial who is a believing Christian, but whose faith was badly damaged by growing up in a hard-nosed fundamentalist church. I told him that when I was a lot younger, I always used to kind of admire fundamentalists from afar. I didn’t want to be one, but they struck me as being committed to the faith in ways that the soft Christians like me weren’t.

His response was interesting:

See, it’s the namby-pambies who create the fundies to a large degree. A lack of seriousness and rigor in one group breeds a perverted form of rigor in another.

What about you readers who have experience in fundamentalism — do you agree with my correspondent?