Brett Grainger’s Plymouth Brethren family revered manual labor and looked on books other than the Bible with mild suspicion. When, on September 11, 1988, Grainger’s grandmother prepared to be raptured, she called his mother to say that she could have grandma’s homemade preserves. The Plymouth Brethren are fundamentalist fundamentalists, strict separationists, “come outers” in the vernacular of the early 20th century, when fundamentalism hardened its resolve to be “in the world but not of it.”

In the World and Not of It is the title of a slim new book by Grainger, a journalist who has traveled between secular NPR and evangelical Sojourners. Grainger alternates between memoir, explication of fundamentalist history and reports from the fronts of contemporary fundamentalism, Hell House and Bible colleges and the Ken Ham’s Creation Museum. The book’s subtitle — One Family’s Militant Faith and the History of Fundamentalism in America — is a bit epic for a story that spans 150 rather small pages, and Grainger’s reported narratives of fundamentalism seem disconnected from the memoir / history, but throughout he maintains a quietly curious tone that allows his family’s “militant faith” to emerge as both tragically constrained and surprisingly adaptable.

Most compelling is Grainger’s insider/outsider observations of his grandparents’ everyday religion, such as the following passage describing in terms as perceptive as any I’ve read the relationship between religion and media, the ways in which the physical embodiments of faith reveal the nuances of a religion that from the outside may appear to be nothing more than a blunt cudgel of doctrine. It’s worth reproducing in full:

Everything in the daily life of the Brethren revolved around reading and digesting the Word. They lived off the Bible the way the Great Plains Indians lived off the buffalo. No part was waste. Horns, spleen, tail — everything had its proper use and purpose. All Scripture was inspired of God and worthy for instruction. Even the vast intestinal stretches of I Chronicles, the endless coils of begats, were laid in the sun to dry, then used to carry water. Not a day passed when they did not search the Scriptures for comfort or correction. The Word waited on the nightstand. It stared down from bookcases and dozed in glove compartments. Women carried a small, tidy volume in their purses. The men’s were considerably larger. A believer’s Bible was expected to age at roughly the same pace as his body. Elderly brothers carried copies that were battered and falling to pieces, with sagging spines and missing pages. Such Bibles were highly prized. They marked a man well acquainted with the Word. My grandfather’s Bible was little more than a patch of rawhide wrapped around a ragged sheaf of pages. The binding was broken and whole chapters were missing or out of order, but he always seemed to be able to find what he needed.

–Jeff Sharlet