Separation Anxiety

“I spent the first 13 years of my life among fundamentalists before they became a fashionably influential demographic,” writes Christine Rosen in My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood (Public Affairs). Growing up in St. Petersburg, Florida, with her father and stepmother, Pam, Rosen attended the Keswick Christian School, where the Bible was the primary textbook, dancing was forbidden, students were instructed to share their faith with Jewish and Catholic friends, and, with the Cold War simmering, many feared being left behind should Armageddon arrive.

Now 32 and “professionally something of a rationalist,” Rosen, who is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., writes sentimentally but honestly about her education, which, she says, “spawned more eccentric than rapturous moments.” One such moment came after Rosen, at age 8, attended a secular summer science program with her sister Cathy, then returned to school and struggled to reconcile the experience with Keswick’s strict creationist teachings. Yet Rosen makes clear she looks back at her school experience with fondness. “The Floridians I knew had their quirks and strengths and humor and weaknesses, just like people everywhere,” she writes. “They just happened to take the Bible literally.”

“Welcome to the science center!” said the middle-age woman wearing khaki shorts and an “I love science!” T-shirt. It was the summer after 3rd grade, and Pam had enrolled Cathy and me in a series of two-week workshops at the Pinellas County Science Center. The science center was one of those ’60s-style buildings, common in St. Petersburg, that attempt to look modern but end up looking like a suburban bank. But it was within walking distance of our house and offered a range of...