A Letter From Taylor

Dear reader,

If you've found your way here, there's a decent chance you already know some version of the fundamentalist world— the catalogs, the curricula, the conference circuit, the specific vocabulary of headship and covering and dominion. I grew up inside it. This site is what I've built since leaving it: first a research paper, then a longer investigation, and now an archive I'm trying to build alongside other people who lived some version of the same childhood, or watched it up close. If you grew up fundie as well, this site and the project it supports are for you too.

If you want the shape of the current research in twenty minutes, start with the research summary. If you want the four-century version, footnoted and sourced the way I'd want it sourced if I were the one reading it skeptically, that's the paper. Either way, everything on this site is built the same way: documented where it can be documented, and testimony held on equal footing where it can't.

If your own life intersected with any part of this — a church, a conference, a homeschool co-op, a family a few names deep in what I've written — I'd like to hear from you. That includes your own account of what you saw or lived through, and it includes anything you might still have sitting in a closet or a hard drive: a catalog, a curriculum binder, a conference recording, a photograph, a newsletter. Institutions like this one leave a paper trail if you know where to look, but a lot of what actually happened only survives in what people kept, or remember. I'm trying to build a place that can hold both, where those of us who got out can explore what we went through, together.

You're welcome to just read. You're also welcome to reach out.

— Taylor Valkyrie