Fundamentals of
Fundamentalism
Fundamentalism
presents the observer with many paradoxes, and one I want to consider with
you today is this: Fundamentalists, whether Protestant, Jewish, Muslim,
all claim to represent "that old time religion" that was good enough for
Moses, for David, for Jesus, and by God it's good enough for them. And yet
if we examine the ample religious writings of antiquity no writer claims
to be a fundamentalist. Granted, many, like the writer of the so-called
Epistle of Jude, claims to be standing up for "the faith once for all
delivered to the saints" against some perceived challenge to that faith.
But what we call fundamentalism is, I think, something distinctly new.
New, let's say, as of the nineteenth century. Fundamentalism's difference
from the dogmatic supernaturalism of the past is the difference between
what Paul Tillich called naive literalism and reflexive literalism.
Throughout most of
history people have believed the world was created and governed by
supernatural forces. They had no way of knowing better, and even today,
sophisticated theological minds reason the same way whenever they argue
for the existence of God by means of the argument from design. "Order
implies an orderer." That's anthropomorphic thinking, not far removed from
saying, "If water pours out when I turn on the faucet, then Zeus must turn
on the heavenly faucet when it rains." It is natural, though false, and
you don't have to be particularly stupid to make that mistake. So it is no
surprise that most people throughout history believed in supernaturalism.
Their belief in it was naive, as yet unchallenged. But once the challenge
comes, once scientific method and historical method make their appearance,
grave doubt is cast upon the miraculous and the supernatural. Many people
have given up their earlier, supernaturalist beliefs. Others refuse to do
so. But they know too much just to forget. Either they have to come to
some sort of terms with the science-inspired doubts they harbor by some
makeshift solution (like Scientific Creationism or Teilhardianism), or
they have to expend a lot of emotional energy telling themselves there's
nothing to worry about after all. The result is reflexive literalism. And
pugnacious defenders of the miraculous, the resurrection of Jesus, the
inerrancy of the Bible, are reflexive literalists.
Theirs is not the
old, traditional faith they think it is. Something new has been added. In
the age of science, believing in the supernatural is simply no longer the
same proposition it was for people in traditional cultures. Old time
religionists were safely ensconced within what Peter Berger calls a
plausibility structure, a social peer group in which unbelief seemed
impossible, since it would go against universal consensus. You would fear
for your sanity if you began to doubt, much as if you decided today to
question the law of gravity. Old time religionists were safely ensconced
within what Wittgenstein called a language game. Everyone they knew shared
the supernaturalist frame of reference. If someone was flattened by a
tree, you might discuss with your neighbors whether the man was done in by
divine punishment or by malicious witchcraft, but your debate was
contained within certain parameters, and within them, all the discourse
sounded reasonable. An outsider might think all of you mad, but
traditionally there weren't any outsiders. None you had to take seriously
anyway.
But these conditions
do not obtain in the world of modern supernaturalist beliefs. Believers
cannot escape the fact that they live and move within a culture filled
with rival belief systems and with scientific anti-supernaturalism. And so
today's literalists must try a lot harder than the ancients did to hold
onto their beliefs, beliefs that once would have been taken for granted.
The naive literalist never had to try at all! The reflexive literalist
knows he is at sea and so he holds on tighter to the plank which bears him
up. No wonder fundamentalists are militant!
Let me give an
example that is not strictly religious but which parallels reflexive
literalism pretty well. Astrology used to be counted one of the sciences.
But as the stellar sciences advanced, some aspects of it bore fruit and
others did not. Some traditional hypotheses proved out experimentally,
while others didn't. The ones that did bear experimental scrutiny we now
call astronomy. The ones that didn't are called astrology. Various
philosophers and theologians of old were astrologers, like Philip
Melanchthon, and we do not think ill of them. The same with most of
so-called Renaissance occultism. The so-called occultists were simply
exploring all available branches of purported knowledge. But what do we
think of astrologers now? Why do we regard them as cranks, quacks,
humbugs? Because they ought to know better! They are hanging onto what has
proven to be pseudo-science. In Melanchthon's day, it was still a live
option. It isn't any more. And likewise, the reflexive literalist ought to
know better. In fact we must suspect he does know better. As Tillich said,
"In this respect fundamentalism has demonic aspects: it destroys the
humble honesty of the search for truth and it splits the conscience of its
thoughtful adherents, since it forces them to suppress aspects of the
truth of which they are dimly aware." Why do you think they are so
vehement? Who are they trying to convince--but themselves?
But there is another
major difference between naive and reflexive literalism of belief. If the
believer is not careful, the focus of his faith may shift. That is, he may
elevate the form over the substance as chief in importance. Let's take the
myth of the seven-day creation. For thousands of years Jews and Christians
took this story as literally true. But they didn't exactly believe it.
It's more like they assumed it was true. And they believed something else
on the basis of it, namely that the world was good and that a godly person
could in good conscience enjoy food, wine, sex, beauty, as the gifts of
God. It was this point that was at issue, against hyper-spiritualists like
the Gnostics who were sour-pussed old killjoys and thought all physical
pleasures were evil. The affirmation of the naive literalist was of the
goodness of the world against the nay-sayers. No one was challenging a
supernatural creation, and so no one had to make that an object of faith.
It was no challenge to believe that. But once modern science threw grave
doubt on Genesis, the focus shifted. All of a sudden it seemed to have
become the point to believe that the story was literally true, whatever
its moral or theological value might be. In the old days, the "natural
science" of the seven-day creation belief was wrong, but it was
irrelevant. Now, with the reflexive literalist, the false science has
become an article of faith. What for the naive literalist was harmlessly
assumed has become for the reflexive literalist a fool's errand to defend
what is patently false.
Tillich called the
belief of the reflexive literalist, the fundamentalist, "idolatrous
faith," since it had raised to ultimate importance that which had
previously been secondary. And, as Tillich predicted, the consequences are
serious. The one who believes his party line must be defended at all costs
has come to redefine "truth" as simply synonymous with the party line.
Thus any and every argument he can think of to defend it is automatically
a good argument. You know what kind of cynicism this breeds. You can see
it every night on CNBC, as the pathetic spin-doctors take the stage to use
whatever misleading rhetoric they can think of to make their candidate
look good. Do you wonder why Creationist debaters use the same old
arguments again and again when they have been soundly flattened time and
again? Whether true to the facts or not, they are still arguments for the
"right side," and so one must use them till something better comes along.
Truth becomes mere propaganda. And that is not good for the character.
So fundamentalism is
different from the naive supernaturalism of all traditional cultures
before the nineteenth century. It is as much a reaction to scientific
modernity as religious modernism was. In fact one can see fundamentalist
and modernist religions as warring twins, as in some Genesis legend cycle.
Both were desperate attempts to come to terms with a common enemy.
As scientific
modernization has spread over the world, first through colonization of the
Third World,
then through the export of technology, traditional cultures have been
threatened with erosion and extinction. And this especially includes
traditionalist belief systems. Imagine the existential angst of some
tribesman, some foreign national whose country has been taken over by
colonial powers with vastly superior technology, in terms both of weapons
and of manufacturing. Your beliefs are suddenly shaken if for no other
reason than your traditional gods did not protect you from the foreign
onslaught. Their gods must be more powerful, hence the relative ease with
which Africans converted to Christianity in the wake of European
colonization. Might as well go with the winners!
But the challenge to
traditional faith goes deeper than that. The arrival on the scene of a
rival belief-system is itself enough to create anomie, since the
traditional belief always seemed self-evident for the simple reason that
everyone believed it! If non-believers, believers in something else,
suddenly appear on the scene, it makes the impossible, the unthinkable,
into an unsettling reality: it is possible to believe something else! And
then one may realize that since their belief seems no more securely
founded than ours, why, perhaps there is no real reason to believe
anything! This is why Socrates was killed. He was associated in the public
mind with the Sophists who had traveled outside
Athens and returned
with the disturbing news that other peoples have other gods, other
religions, other ways of doing things, and this seemed to encourage
relativism.
It goes deeper
still. At first peoples in newly-colonized societies do not understand the
science of Western technology. They think it is magic, which is all they
understand, which is why sometimes Melanesian Islanders would carve out
wooden rifles and expect them to fire like the thunder-sticks of the
foreigners. Or they would make fake radio sets out of crates, because they
didn't know how the real ones worked. But as more and more of them come to
understand how the machines work, they move into the modern form of
consciousness. They become rationalists, and the world, as Durkheim said,
becomes disenchanted. Demons, fairies, and the Providence of God are
replaced by the laws of physics. God eventually gets the pink slip, having
lost his job to automation.
What happens in the
Third World
as it has had greater contact with the West is, of course, just what had
already happened in the West itself. It was the crisis of modernization,
of pluralism, of secularization. And in America and Europe there were
three main forms of religious reactions to the crisis of modernity. We
might use the analogy of various countries' responses to Hitler in the
Second World War.
First, like
Italy and Romania
who saw Hitler as a good bet, there were Religious Humanists who decided
to just swallow hard and admit the truth of Darwinism, biblical Higher
Criticism, etc., and just break ranks with supernaturalist belief.
Second, like
Vichy France,
occupied by the Nazis but still ostensibly independent, the Liberal
Protestants accepted the basic understanding of modernism but took what
refuge they could in the safety zones of philosophy and "religious
experience." They still believed in a God who was not so foolish as to
stick his neck out via falsifiable miracle claims.
And, third, there
was the French Resistance, the radical underground opposition who refused
to yield a foot of ground to the invaders even when their cause seemed
lost. They kept on fighting a rearguard action and regarded the
accommodationists as traitors. These were the fundamentalists. Many yet do
not accept evolution and the critical understanding of the Bible. They are
our reflexive literalists.
The radical
Humanists like the old Unitarians, Ethical Culturists, etc., are off the
charts for our purposes. But the liberal Protestants and the
Fundamentalists are both modernist reactions to modernity. The Liberals,
like Harry Emerson Fosdick, were willing to make great accommodations to
modern thought and learning in order to survive. They parted with
seven-day creation and made God the author of evolution. They rejected
resurrection in favor of Platonic life after death. They jettisoned the
second coming in favor of Social Gospel Utopianism. For them the Bible was
no more an infallible revelation from God, but rather a treasury of human
attempts to capture in words the religious experience. But the
Fundamentalists had accommodated themselves with modernity, too. It just
wasn't as obvious.
They rejected the
ancient notion of God being the cause behind every event and embraced
Newtonian natural law. There was a generally inflexible nexus of
cause-and-effect, but it was God's creation. And this shift enabled them
to explain miracles as suspensions of natural law. Thus they sought to
show that, e.g., the resurrection of Jesus was not susceptible to natural
explanations, and that left only miracle as a viable explanation. By
process of elimination, one could demonstrate the resurrection of Jesus,
the truth of his teaching, and the reality of God and Christianity!
Similarly, Fundamentalists did not simply dismiss Bible critics like
Strauss as unbelievers. To try to win back doubting seminarians to the
fold, apologists adopted the probabilistic approach of the historian but
bent it to their own agenda, finding arguments that would seem to support
their inherited views, e.g., that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, the miracles
all occurred literally, the whale swallowed Jonah. The problem here was
that they had admitted the Trojan Horse. Naive literalists had never
needed convincing that the old faith was true. Reflexive literalists, who
try to prove things, have, like it or not, admitted the propriety of
requiring evidence. And sooner or later their own apologists may take a
second look at the balance of the evidence, something that would never
have upset a naive literalist. I know, for I am one of them! A
disillusioned apologist. I confess.
The other irony, and
I think a fatal one for their movement, is that reflexive literalism makes
a hollow mockery of the old fundamentalist preaching of the gospel of
grace. The old revivalists used to preach to people that they needn't fret
over their unworthiness; God loved them and would forgive them by grace if
only they would come to Jesus. In all this, preacher and sinner were
speaking the same language, playing the same language game. The point at
issue was Luther's: How can I find a gracious God? But now things are
different. Now the whole thing is up for grabs. Evangelical apologist
Francis Schaeffer used to argue that before evangelism could begin,
evangelicals had perforce to engage in pre-evangelism. They had to strive
to get the potential convert back playing the same language game. The
evangelist had to make the Christian worldview seem plausibly real before
the sinner could feel convicted of his sin. Schaeffer, I think, understood
just how great the drift had been. Christianity has become a marginal
voice in the world of modernity. But liberal theologian Rudolf Bultmann
understood something about Schaffer's position that Schaeffer did not
grasp. If you have to persuade the outsider to embrace a lost and alien
worldview, that of traditional supernaturalism, before he can accept the
gospel of grace, you yourself are making it impossible for him to accept
the gospel of grace. For you will be requiring of him a set of cognitive
"good works" before he can be saved. Somehow you must get yourself to
belief outlandish things, or you are cut off from the grace of God. Thus
Bultmann advocated demythologizing the gospel. Rejecting supernaturalism
and miracle as so much outmoded myth, Bultmann preached the existential
self-understanding of the New Testament, which in his view was virtually
the same as Heideggerian "authentic existence." The only difference was
that, according to Bultmann, one could attain such personal authenticity
only by reliance, AA style, upon a higher power.
For fundamentalists,
this kind of modernist, liberal theology is so watered down as to be
scarcely recognizable as religion, and one can understand their reaction.
But again, their alternative is not the old time religion they think it
is. For it is no longer naive literalism. It is reflexive literalism,
where literalism itself, no longer simply assumed, becomes the actual
object of belief. And as Tillich said, that is idolatry, and the practical
results are a stifling intellectual and spiritual legalism, where one dare
not think outside the creedally ordained box lest one fall down the
express shute to Hell.
There are still
naive literalists around. Plenty of them. And it is my perception that
these are not the fundamentalists we Humanists fear and loathe. These are
good neighbors and regular people. They don't know what's going on in the
intellectual arena, like the clueless villagers encountered by Nietzsche's
mad prophet. The light from the distant nova has not yet reached them. So
they cannot understand what all the shouting is about. The people we
grouse about, and who grouse about us, are of course the reflexive
literalists. And sometimes some of them do pretty frightening things, both
legislatively and concretely. But they would never do these things if they
did not recognize what I recognize: that their days are numbered. They
panic because it is clear that they do not in fact live in a Christian
country. They seek to impose on a pluralistic society a unity that was
once indigenous but is no more. And that can never work.
Paul Weyrich, once a
major voice in the Religious Right, saw things pretty clearly, I think,
when recently he urged fellow fundamentalists to drop politics and to give
up the larger society as a lost cause. Instead, Weyrich urged, true
Christians ought to retreat to their subcultural conclaves and live their
lives there by their own rules, their outside influence restricted to that
of being a city set on a hill for outsiders to see, emulate, and even
join, if they like what they see. Weyrich is right. Eventually it must
come to that, as the Amish and the Hassidic Jews of Williamsburg have
seen.
There is a logic of
pluralization. First a cultural monolith fragments into variegated
factions, who eventually find their common life enhanced by a policy of
peaceful coexistence. But unless one actually retreats to geographical
isolation, each sectarian or ethnic enclave will sooner or later erode by
intermarriage and assimilation. Look at the situation of American Judaism
today. The community elders may raise the walls higher, but this will only
make the youth inside more curious about the tempting world beyond, and
the strategy will backfire. Pluralism inevitably results in the wholesale
mixture of ethnic and religious identities.
Religious identities
can mix only by the spouses relativizing their respective religious
heritages. Mixed-faith spouses/parents see pretty quickly what it seems to
take ecumenical theologians generations to see: that beliefs can separate
us only as long as we take them literally enough to argue about. We can
have harmony if we decide our beliefs are less important than our common
morals or are different symbolic ways of saying the same thing. And then
we will be no longer either naive nor reflexive literalists. That's where
it is all headed sooner or later, and a society in which religious beliefs
retire so completely to the background is a secular society.
Fundamentalists see that, and they fear it. That accounts for their fury:
their days are numbered, and what we are seeing is a last hurrah.
Are you worried
about fundamentalists? Let me quote Martin Luther: "His rage we can endure
for, lo, his doom is sure. One little word shall fell him." That word is
pluralism.
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M Price
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