ABSTRACT
‘But you’re an intelligent woman,’ a male friend said to me one day. ‘How on earth did you fall for it?’ ‘It’, in this case, was fundamentalism, otherwise known as born-again Christianity, or the charismatic movement, the modern revivalist form of evangelical Christianity. 1 might have replied that intelligence is no protection against that sense of insecurity which all too often besets the university fresher, especially one like myself, newly liberated from a girls’ convent school, completely naive, and uncomfortable unless told exactly what to do by somebody else. In the eyes of the fundamentalists (as personified by the ‘God Squad’, i.e., proselytizing members of the Christian Union) I was a fruit ripe for the plucking, and in psychological terms I was, in short, plucked.
