Fundamentalism Memoir

At the age of five, Megan Phelps-Roper began protesting homosexuality and other alleged vices alongside fellow members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. Founded by her grandfather and consisting almost entirely of her extended family, the tiny group would gain worldwide notoriety for its pickets at military funerals and celebrations of death and tragedy.

In 1972, Perry Bulwer, a naive sixteen-year-old growing up in Port Alberni, a mill town on Vancouver Island, dropped out of high school to run away with the Children of God, one of a number of millennial Christian cults that sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s. Bulwer takes the listener on an extraordinary trip through the world of biblical literalism, fundamentalist endtime fantasies, paranormal spirituality, evangelical extremism, ritual abuse, and liberally interpreted Biblical teachings that were used to justify licentious sexual doctrines, evangelical prostitution, and child sexual abuse.

A Walk Through the Wilderness takes the listener on a harrowing adventure through the rigid psychological manipulation of a fundamentalist cult, the many joys and sorrows during the years of recovery afterwards, the seeming hopelessness of infertility, and finally to a joy realized. Being raised in a liberal Christian home, Dan never imagined the sorrows he would face as his faith evolved into fundamentalist cult status. For many years, he lived under a rigid religious control structure that managed every aspect of his life and resulted in deep emotional scarring.