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“I am not a neutral observer of this material, and I have not pretended to be one. I am, instead, the kind of witness this movement’s own theology insists cannot exist: a daughter of the household who grew up, left, and wrote it down. That is not a conflict of interest. It is the entire point.”
— from “A Line in the Sand,” Section VI, “On Method”
FundieFiles is built and edited by Taylor Valkyrie, author of “A Line in the Sand: A Counter-Storytelling Account of Calvinist Dominion Theology and Its Political Machinery,” the research paper that anchors this archive. The project grew out of that paper’s own methodological argument — drawn from Critical Race Theory counter-storytelling and autoethnography — that testimony from inside a movement is not a lesser form of evidence than the documentary record. It is a different, comparably rigorous, form of it.
Every claim on this site is sourced. Documentary claims (court filings, tax records, catalogs, news reporting, government documents) are cited to their original record. Testimony is treated as evidence on its own footing, not as color commentary layered on top of the “real” documentary material — and it is triangulated against the documentary record wherever possible, the same standard the founding paper holds itself to.
Claims about named public figures are held to a higher bar: we look for independent corroboration — a second account, or a documentary record — before a claim about a named person goes public. Content is labeled so readers can see, at a glance, what kind of evidence they’re looking at:
Public figures — people who have sought public office, built public-facing organizations, or published material aimed at shaping public policy — are written about in relation to their public record and public statements. Private individuals, including contributors who share their own stories, are never named, described, or identified beyond what they have explicitly consented to.
This is not advocacy media, and it is not trauma memoir. Restraint is a deliberate editorial choice: no sensationalism, no images used for shock value, no urgency framing designed to manufacture alarm. The underlying material carries its own weight. See the paper itself for the full argument and sourcing.