religionscholarama

Was there any variation among IFB families in how extreme some families were compared to others? Were some families more radical and others less?

What was the attitude of the IFB toward health care?

This last question might be a strange one, but from my studies I’ve found if there is any commonality among people from different religions and even different cults you will always find people who love ice cream. Do IFB people, at least some of them, like ice cream?

I’ll keep this to a minimum because if my handle is any indication I study cults and fundamentalists and I don’t want to bombard you with questions.

What might a less-extreme IFB family do that a more-extreme family would not?

Yeah, that strictness scale makes sense. I’ve invented my own scales, like this one scale of how isolated or integrated a religious group is from the rest of regular society.

Category 1: The individual is not evidently or distinctively religious. They might still be religious, but lack a lot of the cultural markers or commitments that would make them stand out from the wider culture surrounding them. Most religions, except for the highly traditional ones, can fall under this category.

Category 2: The religious community has some practices that might stand out from others (such as not drinking alcohol, dress, regularity of religious attendance), but the people are otherwise integrated and can have mainstream goals, interests, and experiences. They have some or a great degree of interaction with non-members.

Category 3: The religious community maintains a degree of separation from the surrounding society. They likely have regular jobs, attend regular schooling, live in a neighborhood, and go out into the world from time to time, but their interactions with it are limited as is their exposure to mainstream media and experiences.

Category 4: The religious community lives a separated life from mainstream society. They might have a different language or dialect. Usually distinctive dress or grooming. Rejection of some degree of technology and secular media, isolated education or careers, and interactions with non-members only when absolutely necessary.

Category 5: They live in a monastery or similar setting where the religion is a 24/7 way of life. The difference here is it is entered into entirely voluntarily. Note that not all monks, nuns, or religious brothers and sisters fall into this category.

I figured most IFBs would probably be a category 4, but some might be a category 3.

Right, that's why I put a qualifier in the last sentence of a description of category 5. It doesn't imply this is how all monasteries are, rather that, the examples I can think of as something even more intense than Category 4 are monasteries, that is, some of them. I've been to monasteries myself that don't match the Category 5 description.

Yeah, they have some similarities to the Exclusive Brethren, but the EB have their own specific practices. The EB are not descended from the Baptist theology of the IFB movement. I would say the Exclusive Brethren are a little closer to the Amish, in some ways, than even the IFB are.