David Neiwert has Sara Robinson filling in for him at his Orcinus blog while he's on vacation. She's doing a series on authoritarianism. Without understanding something about that, the actions and speeches of today's Republican Party will seem incomprehensible. (They're pretty darn strange, even if you do understand authoritarianism!)
Listening to the Leavers 08/12/06 was a particularly intriguing one. She talks about an online group in which she participates for recovering Christian fundamentalists, of which she counts herself one.
The whole thing is worth reading. But this one sentence alone is worth the time:
Most of the adult-onset fundies in our group joined up because they were in a similar place of sheer overwhelm.
She uses "adult-onset fundies" to refer to people who convert to an authoritarian church as adults, not having been raised in one.
The "sheer overwhelm" phrase is pretty clear, it refers to being in state of being sheerly overwhelmed. I'm not sure "sheer overwhelm" is gramatically correct. But, heck, language changes. And I'm adopting that one as part of my vocabulary. Saying "they were in a place of sheer overwhelm" just conveys a different concept than "feeling sheerly overwhelmed." "Place of sheer overwhelm" has a sense of being profoundly trapped that "sheerly overwhelmed" doesn't quite catch.
I'm going to use "adult-onset fundies", too, although I prefer the spelling "fundi".
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