Is Fundamentalism the Enemy of God?
People who attempt to bridge the gap between scientific rationalism and religious spiritualism often times find themselves without many friends but with many enemies. One of the most sure fire ways of predicting the prevalence and veracity of violent fundamentalism is those times in history when modernity is advancing into areas of cosmology, human origins, medicine or physics that seem to deny conventional Christian orthodoxy. Rather than learn from this, Christianity seems content to replay this dynamic over and over as history progresses. I find this interesting because it seems to me that given time, greater spiritual truth always comes out as science advances. Today’s Christianity does not recoil against modern medicine - but such advances came after medicine broke through archaic Christian prejudices about medicine in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Christianity can not broadly claim that its institutions have understood where to be discriminating in the use of science. Such a statement should be damning to us.
Is Fundamentalism the Enemy of God?
In the midst of reading Karen Armstrong’s The Battle For God: A History of Fundamentalism I was struck by a simple thought: is fundamentalism the enemy of God? Many divide the world into two segments: the sacred and the secular. Underneath this delineation is an even greater one: between mythos and logos - a sacred tension between those that seek to know God through the mythology innate in spirituality versus those who seek to reconcile themselves to God through something they can do, a life they can lead in conjunction with the rationality of logic, legalism and the fundamentalism that always results. Fundamentalism requires simple and non-abstract thinking which, I would maintain, will always belittle God, forcing Him to fit into our understanding of the world around us as well as His outworking in history. For too many fundamentalists, the fear of modernity is that it will somehow replace man’s need for God - a statement that shows the lack of understanding for many fundamentalists of the deepest and most intimate cry for the divine that has been placed within us all.
Our world is currently torn between three camps: the Christian religious fundamentalists, the Islamic religious fundamentalists, and the rational thinkers of various faiths who advocate dialogue and a global forum to determine geo-political action. The first two camps, those of Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, have much more in common with one another than either do with the third. Both fundamentalist camps claim, among other things, to have absolute knowledge of truth (both spiritual and social) and the responsibility to force those that disagree into their way of thinking.
At certain times in history, the world has been torn apart as cultures come into intimate contact with one another and basic beliefs are challenged. Making this problem more severe, many times these interactions have been facilitated by advents in technology - discoveries in fields of travel, science and medicine. The result is not just cultures that do not understand one another, but cultures that are also grappling with how the newest wave of modernity is going to crash into them. Reasonably, most cultures reflexively construct barriers to these developments, struggling to protect that which they hold so dear, fearing the effect of the unknown on the known.
We stand at such an impasse today. The commonly held notion that the Christian West and the Islamic East are on a collision course prevails among people who could know better if they were to expend the slightest energy in understanding a culture that does not look like their own. Technology beckons to us with all the benefits of modern medicine, but here again we see people struggling to know where the line between science being used to hurt or to heal should be drawn. Developments such as stem cell research reveal in a moment the thorny questions posed by modernity - questions that many institutionalized churches are not equipped to answer. The realization that religion has always struggled to accept scientific advancement is lost on most fundamentalists - even though they enjoy the fruits of a society riddled with technology, pregnant with potential. Armstrong sees this in our shared past when she states “People were beginning to recoil from the civilization they had created, at the same time as they enjoyed the undoubted benefits it conferred.” (page 136) What has been true in the past is becoming increasingly true in the present as cultures collide with the unrelenting advancement of modernity.
The Threat of Modernity
People who attempt to bridge the gap between scientific rationalism and religious spiritualism often times find themselves without many friends but with many enemies. One of the most sure fire ways of predicting the prevalence and veracity of violent fundamentalism is those times in history when modernity is advancing into areas of cosmology, human origins, medicine or physics that seem to deny conventional Christian orthodoxy. Rather than learn from this, Christianity seems content to replay this dynamic over and over as history progresses. I find this interesting because it seems to me that given time, greater spiritual truth always comes out as science advances. Today’s Christianity does not recoil against modern medicine - but such advances came after medicine broke through archaic Christian prejudices about medicine in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Christianity can not broadly claim that its institutions have understood where to be discriminating in the use of science. Such a statement should be damning to us.
Somewhere Christian thought has so degenerated as to forget that the most common means by which God has reached man has not been Scripture - it has been the revelation of the vastness and order of the universe contrasted to the singularity of human consciousness. Where Christianity has misunderstood scientific revelation, it has misunderstood the order that God placed into the universe pointing back to His existence. In a world where I can not physically walk with God, where I must live on faith of things hoped for, the evidence of which can not be seen, I take enormous joy in the natural revelation of an engineered universe. Such revelation compensates for the vast distance between God and me. It is in the soothing nature of science that I can find reason to believe, reinforcement for my faith, and reminders of something greater than my ambition and the smallness of my sin.
Could it be that Christianity needs to be open to more than Scriptural revelation; perhaps to natural revelation? Has the Church, through the ages in fact, been so resistant to the revelation of an ordered universe pointing back to an all powerful Creator God, that we have forced science to become a tool of humanism? I would suggest to you that fundamentalism has much to answer for as a tool of oppression of God’s revelation to us by His perfect design for the universe.
While reading this, it is possible to be troubled and perhaps even pained at my willingness to bring together camps some would see as being militantly fundamentalist with more tolerant, less sectarian camps. This is a criticism many Christians would no doubt employ. However, I believe little can be done with this attitude as long as Christians flock to the ridiculous teachings of certain prophecy junkies. The infatuation American Christians have with prophecy is indicative of a greater problem, a problem unique to fundamentalism. What most Christians do not grasp is their interest in these events is many times generated from their response to an underlying threat posed to them by the advent of certain parts of modernity.
Within the American Christian sub-culture, eschatology reigns supreme, and for dark reasons. Works by people such as Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins signify a deep mistrust within the American Christian culture - a longing to have the complexities and troubles posed by this world removed. The eschatology advocated by these men affords Christians an opportunity to engage in secret thoughts of being proven right, of being justified on this earth (keeping in mind these stories fixate on the horror on earth of the post-Rapture events rather than the glory of heaven Revelation speaks so frequently of). Armstrong touches on this point when she says that “… this fatalistic scenario also gave the fundamentalists, who felt despised and ostracized by the mainstream culture, a sense of confidence and superiority. They had privileged information, denied to the secularist or liberal Christian, and knew what was really going on.” (page 217) As with Christian fundamentalists’ view of hell, their view of eschatology is invariably shaped less by a desire to be in the company of God and more by a desire to be right - something anyone can easily understand who has an appreciation of the value our Puritan forefathers placed on being right.
People who advocate this system of eschatology do so out of the same reason groups of sectarian people throughout the ages have - they are threatened by the advent of modernity. Readers who delve into books such as The Last Days Are Here Again: A History of the End Times by Richard Kyle will see quite clearly that such eschatological perspectives develop as already cloistered, sectarian sub-cultures attempt to deal with realities that are outside of what they have chosen to believe. As a part of drawing up a complex systemized theology, they are forced to ascribe meaning to things that have little literal meaning and respond to that which could be better left alone. The path from here to militancy is very short, and one fundamentalists across time have frequently walked down.
Armstrong’s comments about the role eschatology plays in revealing underlying fears and prejudices is worth quoting in length. “At the same time as Protestant fundamentalists celebrated the birth of the new Israel, they were cultivating fantasies of a final genocide at the end of time. The Jewish state had come into existence purely to further a Christian fulfillment … They had evolved their literal and ‘scientific’ reading of scripture in response to the rationalistic spirit of the modern world, yet if the true test of a religious vision is that it helps believers to cultivate the cardinal virtue of compassion (a teaching that informs the Gospels and the letters of St. Paul, if not the Book of Revelation), Protestant fundamentalism seemed to be failing as a religious movement, just as at the Scopes trial its science had proved to be defective. Indeed, their literal reading of highly selected passages of the Bible had encouraged them to absorb the Godless genocidal tendencies of modernity.” (page 218) I would go further and say that Christians’ blind support for Israel’s current policies in Palestine is indicative of a deep unwillingness to give up on a nation state whose existence is necessary for their highly ordered eschatology. Palestinian horror is tenable as long as the nation-state of Israel gives fundamentalists something tangible upon which to hang their hopes of being vindicated on this earth. Only fundamentalists know whether or not in their heart of hearts they genuinely desire to live to see Christ come again so that they may be with Him or whether or not their subscription to the events of the Rapture speak of a greater fear - having to face death and their deepest insecurities about their own highly structured belief system. I see, especially in the crowd that espouses a “pre-Tribulation Rapture” a means of avoiding death, a fear true believers should not have.
The Threat of Nothingness
We are told in the Bible that God the Father knows our name - in fact, He knows the number of hairs of our head. But, we also are told that no one can know His name - that no one can see His face and live. Within this tension is a difficulty many people struggle with: we put our faith into that which we can not see and that which we can not prove. To be able to do either would negate the very essence of what faith is composed of. We would do well to listen more often to the nagging fears in our minds, the suspicion of religious platitudes and be honest about our fears of nothingness. I find it interesting that some of the most insightful religious thinkers that have stood the test of time, men such as Pascal, understood this fear, shared it, and used it to shape their thought life.
Rational atheist thinkers such as Bertrand Russell believed religion was merely our response to a psychological need for life to have meaning. Logically then, Russell believed that when religious people came together they would invariably be drawn into pursuit of power because such a pursuit compensated for their acknowledgement that they are threatened by the permanence of death and so must seek retribution and power in this life in the case the next proves to be non-existent. I would suggest that fundamentalists, of any stripe, are guilty of this. Fundamentalists are fundamentalists for a number of reasons, but one of the most primary ones is their fear over their belief system not being right. I find that truly secure people can live with the threat of pluralism and the mystery of nothingness hanging over their heads.
Such people’s view of God is profound and compatible with Scripture. In contrast, the view of God for fundamentalists is capricious, angry and mean. Why? Because their God looks at the world through the same threatening eyes as do his fundamentalist followers. Their God fears that man will find Him unnecessary. What will He do with them then? Such a God is small, having had the anthropomorphic quality of loss of identity transposed onto that which they claim to worship. Such a quality can certainly be tragically found in many fundamentalist camps - another sign that they have not fully experienced what it means to be remade in the identify of something much bigger than you - the identity of Christ. I would contend that only when God has revealed Himself to us can we become fully grounded and reasonable people. For fundamentalists, I wonder if this revelation has not taken place, and so they substitute spiritual meaning for stale sectarian thinking - the spiritual equivalent to economic isolationism if you will.
The Ageless Inability To Reconcile Mythos and Logos
This innate fear of nothingness, a fear many cynics have rightly questioned leads some to religious fervor, is part of a broader struggle within the human mind, specifically the struggle between mythos and logos. Mythos (the word from which we derive our word mythology) and logos (from which we derive logic) are age-old concepts that have been debated and fought over. Fundamentalism requires absolutes - you are either in or you are out. You are within the group or you are without. You are good or you are evil. You agree and can be accepted, or you disagree and must be ostracized and punished.
Students of any religious group that is highly structured and rigidly sectarian will note that their belief systems require very strong delineations between these areas - no gray area is acceptable. Whether discussion Calvin’s oppression through the state of those who disagreed with his religious views or today’s militant Muslims who are willing to employ terror in the name of protecting culture from the onslaught of depravity, either fundamentalist camp requires that their followers divest themselves of anything that is unknown.
Martin Luther, who coined the Latin term rabies theologorum (the madness of theologians), knew what could happen when theologians allowed themselves to wander into areas that were best left to tremendous mystery. I am convinced that the most authentic of all Christian faith reveals itself in a well-balanced life; in a life comfortable with tension in theology and uncomfortable with everything being wrapped up in a nice systematic theology. I find the idea of systematic theology almost heretical: theology literally means “the study of God.” Theologians are “the ones who study God.” So what we end up with in a study of systematic theology is a system (or doctrines) that effectively and efficiently summarize God. Where fundamentalists believe such a mountain can be climbed, I do not. I question whether or not such a tidy summation will ever be possible.
Even Paul calls us to be shepherds of “the mysteries of Christ.” It is in those words I find comfort - I can see in the tension between doctrines, theological perspectives, dogmas, and lifestyle concerns, the need to remind ourselves constantly that we are the creatures and He is the Creator. I, for one, am willing to accept my role as the creature and move into a world-view that is comfortable with tension, comfortable with discord, not because I am unwilling to employ my intellect, but because my intellect recognizes my place in the cosmos and in eternity. Again, most fundamentalists recoil at the tension required to walk such fine lines and as a result, seek safety in specific beliefs that give them solace they are right and that the boundaries are clearly defined.
In my past religious experiences I have seen the latent racism, the prejudice, the inability to connect to one-another, the blind emphasis on mass evangelism versus connected discipleship, the mindset that God must be a Republican, the Christianity that struggles to remake its followers through the renewing of their minds versus a visceral and cosmetic revamping of the externals. We said we wanted to live a life of principles, but we could not find a way to do that without making life a prison.
For me, the Christian sub-culture of the last 50 years is not compelling. I was a functioning atheist for a part of my life because, in part, I could not reconcile my Christian experience with what I felt constituted authentic spirituality. I now look back at my time as an atheist as a vacation from spirituality. I turned that part of my inner-self off to the extent that I could. I lived with the questions, the nagging doubts, and the unanswered sense of more. But one day, my frailty reminded me that it was time to take these questions more seriously. Where once I could hope that my questions about God would be lost in the pursuit of the day, my illness forced me to question my own mortality. Illness, that sweet reminder of the final journey we must all take, became a silent master, forcing me to deal with why I was so unwilling to pursue God. My life in church captivity would no longer suffice as a reason for not developing my beliefs. My past wounds from religion were real, and as I began to explore my questions, it became obvious that my frustration with the sub-culture of Christianity was as much a part of my disbelief as was any grandiose question about God’s existence. And so for much too-long, I resisted spirituality because I was unwilling to be identified with religion. I wanted no part of what I saw as the one dimensional existence American religion required.
The lack of security within fundamentalists strikes many, me included, of their deeper fears and perhaps even sub-conscious recognition that they do not know the truth. Legalism and fundamentalism are one in the same because legalism requires action in the minutia, something that fills up one’s mind with drivel, discarding deeper thoughts that would remedy a life of trivializations.
Conclusion
My essay started with a question: is fundamentalism the enemy of God? The cynic in me says that much truth exists in this statement; however, I think it most honest to act, speak and think in love with those to whom fundamentalism beckons. Fundamentalism is attractive to many who are wounded and frightened. A point I have not explored in this essay, but hope to in future work, is that fundamentalism is attractive to many because it establishes a God-figure that has much in common with their father-figure in real life. I would suggest to you that many fundamentalists are drawn to militant or highly sectarian faiths in large part because they are most comfortable with those sub-cultures that remind them of their family. It takes unique individuals to explore themselves to such an extent that they can divest themselves of their past and find new communities within which to be safe and properly explore the most salient questions of human existence.
To the extent that fundamentalists of any stripe are strongly sectarian for reasons that have to do with their fear of modernity we must act in love. For many, the ability to understand an increasingly complex world forces them to accept that which they are most comfortable with and again here, many find themselves drawn to militant sectarian environments after having been raised by angry and threatened fathers who were unable to cope with the world around them.
As with any issue that Christians must face, our response to fundamentalism must be framed within the construct of love. God does not love us because we are right; He loves us because it is not within His nature to do anything other. May the same be said of us, even our love of those with whom we have precious little in common with.
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“If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.”
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