I am not as sanguine as you are, Diana, about the decline of old-time religious fundamentalism. In terms of giving Christianity a bad name among Gen-X, Millennials and Gen Z I think they’ve already won. I get irritated every time I see a headline in a “national” newspaper (where they ought to know better) that “Christians do this...” or “Christians object to that...” when what the articles are really about are fundamentalist or evangelical Christians. There are no distinctions. And though the Catholic Bishops occasionally get front page coverage, news of progressive Christian bodies are relegated to page 14 if they are reported at all. And then the headlines are “Episcopalians do ...” or “Lutherans object to ...” omitting to name these bodies Christian. Fundamentalist religion may be declining, but they are taking the rest of us down with them.
As far as fundamentalism as a hierarchical world view, I read someone of note say (maybe it was you!) that from the dawn of cities, human civilization has been hierarchical. It’s the default political/economic system of humankind. Democracy is a rare jewel among civilizations, only too easily subverted to the default. I’m not sure fundamentalist is the right word for conservative people who prefer the imagined stability of the default system, but I don’t have a good substitute.
Written at an accessible level, Bruce Bawer’s mid-1990s STEALING JESUS: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity was a vivid indictment of what is now called The Religious Right in America. It was a movement merely budding when he wrote warning of what is now a bizarre reality. I came under fire for writing positive reviews in various 🇨🇦 publications affirming BB’s likening of some F’dst figures in the US to the Taliban who at the time were destroying historic cultural sculptures in Afghanistan. I wouldn’t retract a thing I wrote.
I don’t want to live in The Handmaids Tale, but ever since I read it in the 80’s, I have seen it in the wind. All we need add is a dose of mass infertility and we will be there.
The fundamental discourse is too intellectual for my simple mind. I perked up when Diana referred to "clerics and oligarchs" thinking we could come to some conclusion about Krill and Putin. But the only thing that I can say is the obvious fact that their unholy alliance has produced nothing but Chaos and disorder in Ukraine, which seems quite the opposite of the nature of fundamentalists. The order they created surprisingly enough is in NATO and the Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic churches. My pastor (non-denominational) frequently asserts that the Presbyterian ministry has failed the church by politicizing it's focus and rhetoric. PCA statements recently on abortion are indicative. I would have to say the the church has failed in general, because it strays from the gospel. It waters down the resurrection, deemphasizes the virgin birth and generally stays away from many of the critical elements of Jesus teaching. If fundamentalism meant a strict focus on the teachings of the scripture (like it sounds), then it would be a good thing. The idea that we have to get Jesus out of the church to hear his word and incorporate it into our lives, this is the challenge of the church. And, probably until we do that as fundamentalist's, progressives, catholic, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Christians of every walk, we are going to continue to lose people to the amorphous gentile spiritual aura, in abdication of a gathering of the folk, to which we are committed.
You didn't touch on the links with a 'conspiratorial mindset' (conspiracy theories), but that seems to be an inevitable extension of such a hierarchical ontology. The shadowy elites at the top may as well be gods, and fundamentalists' enemies are frequently demonised rather than merely opposed. I hope you'll write something about this aspect in the future!
"Fundamentalism", "evangelicalism", and the like can be useful as well-defined academic and sociological categories to define what is/is not part of the whatever-it-is that is being studied and analyzed. While this has its uses, I think it leads to hairsplitting and arm-wrestling over categories and distracts from the bigger picture. A sister of mine who is an intellectual property attorney once observed that the term Christian has had poor brand protection over time -- anyone can claim it, anyone can define it any way they want., anyone can apply it as a label to anything that catches their fancy ... and there is no singular authority to say whether any particular use of the term Christian is correct/incorrect, right/wrong, appropriate/inappropriate.. In our specifically 21st Century American situation, it may be more to the point to discuss religious traditions that grew out of the slaveholder churches of the Old South. We know that "making Christians out of them" was one of the justifications for capturing people in Africa and bringing them as slaves to America. We know that teaching and preaching in churches where slavery was practiced emphasized the master-slave relationship. Despite this, the enslaved people also picked up on the themes of deliverance and liberation in the stories they heard in their masters' churches, stories which they centered on in their own communities. Today, Christians of all types celebrate the legacy of the spirituals and the heritage of the Black churches that grew out of this era. However, while the enslaved Black population managed to find sacred truth in spite of everything intended to prevent that, there was no similar deliverance for the white, slave-owning populations. Instead they were continually indoctrinated in their own reality. Diana's insights into the emphasis on hierarchy are quite right. The slave owners used their influence to cultivate church doctrines in which God established a hierarchical order among people with the white males at the top of the order as the ones who were created and ordained by God to rule over everything. Because God put them in their positions of power, whatever they chose to do was right and appropriate. They were the rulers -- and God's role in things was to enforce their rule. When viewed from this angle, it's really no surprise so many self-professed evangelical Christians went all-in on someone like the previous occupant of the Oval Office.
Whew! I'm worried, too. And the more so at seeing your cogent discussion of the source of the "persecution" meme. It's not silly and temporary; I am now persuaded it is part and parcel of their rigid system of order.
The connection between fundamentalism and hierarchy is clarifying and helpful - it feels true in the same sense as the Justice's 'know it when I see it'. As a person raised in the Southern Baptist Church (prior to the 1970s moderate/conservative split) I am pondering one piece that doesn't exactly fit: Baptist polity is congregational, not (at least technically) hierarchical. But my observation today (no longer a Baptist) is that at the congregational level it is common to see a hierarchy constructed around a charismatic pastor. I would love it if you could tease out this paradox in your further explorations. Might it mean, for example, that fundamentalism in the USA is birthed or fed "from the bottom, not the top"? Or does it just mean we're lucky it isn't totally hierarchical, in which case it could be a lot worse?
As far as you’ve gone thus far in today’s Cottage post, I’m with you, Diana and share your concerns. When you write: “ The structure itself is God’s holiness embodied; human beings must submit or change to fit within it.”…I add that for me no longer can there be one entity/Deity which anyone can claim to be the source of all truth, and the notion of an “unchanging God” makes absolutely no sense at all! After all, we are the human
Ever since Madeleine l’Engle coined the phrase “fundalit”, when she spoke a decade or so again in BC’s Sorrento Conference Centre, my issue has been with the dangerously limiting “box” certain personalities who are fearful of evolving human consciousness needing instead of unchanging by one jot or tittle (although they pick and choose and/or interpret all Scripture to reflect their given innate or learned attitudes about human nature et al.
I’ll say more, after reading some more. Suffice to say, for me the idea of the Holy/Sacred Presence/Spirit/Mystery/Image being limited to any words spoken or written or kept alive orally in any tradition…rather than being the living truth which continues to be revealed in human experience and ongoing history is worth little if anything. All previously known, experienced, believed must be open to ongoing revelation to each and all of us who want to reflect upon the reality we experience, and judge everything by what
I continue to have more and more respect for Diana Butler Bass' ability to see the whole picture and to communicate what she sees so clearly. I am very grateful. Doug Carpenter, Birmingham
I think fundamentalist are on their last big push… with the Trump win and now possibly the Supreme Court too, they see this as victory…
But they all miss one big point, the youth, the 20-30 something’s. Many have left that flock, especially after the Trump sh*t show. The true seekers saw the hypocrisy and either left the church or left the faith.
But yet there is a stream, an undercurrent that’s brewing. We all long for truth and justice… And will use this longing for a new type of movement. It will emerge from the unexpected places… it will not come from within the church any more than the “Jesus Movement” did in the 70’s. It will come from the the Gen-x, the ones who want to save the planet, the alternative groups, those who long for social justice… in fact, it already has taken root in the “Bernie Sander” followers in that they want truth, justice and accountability.
I think the fundamentalist will continue to evolve into some type of political beast that will most certainly one day usher in the anti-Christ.
I mean they already served Trump, so what’s a few more steps towards the Beast?
My sense is that the fundamentalist ontology is almost the inevitable result of a theology in which God is a transcendent other who only speaks through a specifically canonized “orthodoxy.” To me, the problem with much white liberal Christianity is that it accepts the fundamentalist premise of God as transcendent other and simply mitigates the absoluteness of God’s authority and control. A true alternative to the fundamentalist God is a God who does not stand outside reality as a puppetmaster and unmoved mover, but a God who is actually the crucified flesh of the universe, as scandalous as that has always been for Christian theologians with Platonist sensibilities. What if Jesus is not God entering the world from the outside but God manifesting in a specific human what God’s relationship to material reality has always been like? The fundamental error of patriarchal theology is to think creation can happen ex nihilo as though creation can be ejaculated into a vacuum and not a preexisting womb. God creates out of her own body as a womb does. I think it’s time we start calling God Mother and repent of the patriarchal religion that has predominated humanity since some religious authority figure convinced Adam and Eve to abandon their embodied divinity and trust an external knowledge of good and evil mediated through a hierarchical institution to tell them what to do. The doctrine of original sin is the greatest trick the serpent ever pulled, because the serpent has always been the religious authority that corrupts humanity and crucifies God. And the fruit the serpent keeps offering is every orthodoxy whose idolatry destroys humanity.
This focus on hierarchy rather than particular doctrinal beliefs or levels of anger/aggressiveness really helped me understand fundamentalism in a broader way. I agree with you that the more chaotic the world seems, the more people are willing to ignore their former morals/virtues/critical thinking in favor of a person or idea that claims to Just Fix It Already. It is quite a challenge to figure out how global instability and chaos can turn us toward compassion, equity, and critical thought and not away from it.
I am not as sanguine as you are, Diana, about the decline of old-time religious fundamentalism. In terms of giving Christianity a bad name among Gen-X, Millennials and Gen Z I think they’ve already won. I get irritated every time I see a headline in a “national” newspaper (where they ought to know better) that “Christians do this...” or “Christians object to that...” when what the articles are really about are fundamentalist or evangelical Christians. There are no distinctions. And though the Catholic Bishops occasionally get front page coverage, news of progressive Christian bodies are relegated to page 14 if they are reported at all. And then the headlines are “Episcopalians do ...” or “Lutherans object to ...” omitting to name these bodies Christian. Fundamentalist religion may be declining, but they are taking the rest of us down with them.
As far as fundamentalism as a hierarchical world view, I read someone of note say (maybe it was you!) that from the dawn of cities, human civilization has been hierarchical. It’s the default political/economic system of humankind. Democracy is a rare jewel among civilizations, only too easily subverted to the default. I’m not sure fundamentalist is the right word for conservative people who prefer the imagined stability of the default system, but I don’t have a good substitute.
Written at an accessible level, Bruce Bawer’s mid-1990s STEALING JESUS: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity was a vivid indictment of what is now called The Religious Right in America. It was a movement merely budding when he wrote warning of what is now a bizarre reality. I came under fire for writing positive reviews in various 🇨🇦 publications affirming BB’s likening of some F’dst figures in the US to the Taliban who at the time were destroying historic cultural sculptures in Afghanistan. I wouldn’t retract a thing I wrote.
Holy moly, this is spot on. Best description of fundamentalism I have ever read.
I don’t want to live in The Handmaids Tale, but ever since I read it in the 80’s, I have seen it in the wind. All we need add is a dose of mass infertility and we will be there.
This caused me to revisit a message I was present for in 2007. Fundamentalism can be defined in 3 words- "A power machine".
The fundamental discourse is too intellectual for my simple mind. I perked up when Diana referred to "clerics and oligarchs" thinking we could come to some conclusion about Krill and Putin. But the only thing that I can say is the obvious fact that their unholy alliance has produced nothing but Chaos and disorder in Ukraine, which seems quite the opposite of the nature of fundamentalists. The order they created surprisingly enough is in NATO and the Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic churches. My pastor (non-denominational) frequently asserts that the Presbyterian ministry has failed the church by politicizing it's focus and rhetoric. PCA statements recently on abortion are indicative. I would have to say the the church has failed in general, because it strays from the gospel. It waters down the resurrection, deemphasizes the virgin birth and generally stays away from many of the critical elements of Jesus teaching. If fundamentalism meant a strict focus on the teachings of the scripture (like it sounds), then it would be a good thing. The idea that we have to get Jesus out of the church to hear his word and incorporate it into our lives, this is the challenge of the church. And, probably until we do that as fundamentalist's, progressives, catholic, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Christians of every walk, we are going to continue to lose people to the amorphous gentile spiritual aura, in abdication of a gathering of the folk, to which we are committed.
You didn't touch on the links with a 'conspiratorial mindset' (conspiracy theories), but that seems to be an inevitable extension of such a hierarchical ontology. The shadowy elites at the top may as well be gods, and fundamentalists' enemies are frequently demonised rather than merely opposed. I hope you'll write something about this aspect in the future!
"Fundamentalism", "evangelicalism", and the like can be useful as well-defined academic and sociological categories to define what is/is not part of the whatever-it-is that is being studied and analyzed. While this has its uses, I think it leads to hairsplitting and arm-wrestling over categories and distracts from the bigger picture. A sister of mine who is an intellectual property attorney once observed that the term Christian has had poor brand protection over time -- anyone can claim it, anyone can define it any way they want., anyone can apply it as a label to anything that catches their fancy ... and there is no singular authority to say whether any particular use of the term Christian is correct/incorrect, right/wrong, appropriate/inappropriate.. In our specifically 21st Century American situation, it may be more to the point to discuss religious traditions that grew out of the slaveholder churches of the Old South. We know that "making Christians out of them" was one of the justifications for capturing people in Africa and bringing them as slaves to America. We know that teaching and preaching in churches where slavery was practiced emphasized the master-slave relationship. Despite this, the enslaved people also picked up on the themes of deliverance and liberation in the stories they heard in their masters' churches, stories which they centered on in their own communities. Today, Christians of all types celebrate the legacy of the spirituals and the heritage of the Black churches that grew out of this era. However, while the enslaved Black population managed to find sacred truth in spite of everything intended to prevent that, there was no similar deliverance for the white, slave-owning populations. Instead they were continually indoctrinated in their own reality. Diana's insights into the emphasis on hierarchy are quite right. The slave owners used their influence to cultivate church doctrines in which God established a hierarchical order among people with the white males at the top of the order as the ones who were created and ordained by God to rule over everything. Because God put them in their positions of power, whatever they chose to do was right and appropriate. They were the rulers -- and God's role in things was to enforce their rule. When viewed from this angle, it's really no surprise so many self-professed evangelical Christians went all-in on someone like the previous occupant of the Oval Office.
Whew! I'm worried, too. And the more so at seeing your cogent discussion of the source of the "persecution" meme. It's not silly and temporary; I am now persuaded it is part and parcel of their rigid system of order.
scary but solid analysis. thank you for building on Fosdick
The connection between fundamentalism and hierarchy is clarifying and helpful - it feels true in the same sense as the Justice's 'know it when I see it'. As a person raised in the Southern Baptist Church (prior to the 1970s moderate/conservative split) I am pondering one piece that doesn't exactly fit: Baptist polity is congregational, not (at least technically) hierarchical. But my observation today (no longer a Baptist) is that at the congregational level it is common to see a hierarchy constructed around a charismatic pastor. I would love it if you could tease out this paradox in your further explorations. Might it mean, for example, that fundamentalism in the USA is birthed or fed "from the bottom, not the top"? Or does it just mean we're lucky it isn't totally hierarchical, in which case it could be a lot worse?
As far as you’ve gone thus far in today’s Cottage post, I’m with you, Diana and share your concerns. When you write: “ The structure itself is God’s holiness embodied; human beings must submit or change to fit within it.”…I add that for me no longer can there be one entity/Deity which anyone can claim to be the source of all truth, and the notion of an “unchanging God” makes absolutely no sense at all! After all, we are the human
Ever since Madeleine l’Engle coined the phrase “fundalit”, when she spoke a decade or so again in BC’s Sorrento Conference Centre, my issue has been with the dangerously limiting “box” certain personalities who are fearful of evolving human consciousness needing instead of unchanging by one jot or tittle (although they pick and choose and/or interpret all Scripture to reflect their given innate or learned attitudes about human nature et al.
I’ll say more, after reading some more. Suffice to say, for me the idea of the Holy/Sacred Presence/Spirit/Mystery/Image being limited to any words spoken or written or kept alive orally in any tradition…rather than being the living truth which continues to be revealed in human experience and ongoing history is worth little if anything. All previously known, experienced, believed must be open to ongoing revelation to each and all of us who want to reflect upon the reality we experience, and judge everything by what
I continue to have more and more respect for Diana Butler Bass' ability to see the whole picture and to communicate what she sees so clearly. I am very grateful. Doug Carpenter, Birmingham
I think fundamentalist are on their last big push… with the Trump win and now possibly the Supreme Court too, they see this as victory…
But they all miss one big point, the youth, the 20-30 something’s. Many have left that flock, especially after the Trump sh*t show. The true seekers saw the hypocrisy and either left the church or left the faith.
But yet there is a stream, an undercurrent that’s brewing. We all long for truth and justice… And will use this longing for a new type of movement. It will emerge from the unexpected places… it will not come from within the church any more than the “Jesus Movement” did in the 70’s. It will come from the the Gen-x, the ones who want to save the planet, the alternative groups, those who long for social justice… in fact, it already has taken root in the “Bernie Sander” followers in that they want truth, justice and accountability.
I think the fundamentalist will continue to evolve into some type of political beast that will most certainly one day usher in the anti-Christ.
I mean they already served Trump, so what’s a few more steps towards the Beast?
My sense is that the fundamentalist ontology is almost the inevitable result of a theology in which God is a transcendent other who only speaks through a specifically canonized “orthodoxy.” To me, the problem with much white liberal Christianity is that it accepts the fundamentalist premise of God as transcendent other and simply mitigates the absoluteness of God’s authority and control. A true alternative to the fundamentalist God is a God who does not stand outside reality as a puppetmaster and unmoved mover, but a God who is actually the crucified flesh of the universe, as scandalous as that has always been for Christian theologians with Platonist sensibilities. What if Jesus is not God entering the world from the outside but God manifesting in a specific human what God’s relationship to material reality has always been like? The fundamental error of patriarchal theology is to think creation can happen ex nihilo as though creation can be ejaculated into a vacuum and not a preexisting womb. God creates out of her own body as a womb does. I think it’s time we start calling God Mother and repent of the patriarchal religion that has predominated humanity since some religious authority figure convinced Adam and Eve to abandon their embodied divinity and trust an external knowledge of good and evil mediated through a hierarchical institution to tell them what to do. The doctrine of original sin is the greatest trick the serpent ever pulled, because the serpent has always been the religious authority that corrupts humanity and crucifies God. And the fruit the serpent keeps offering is every orthodoxy whose idolatry destroys humanity.
This focus on hierarchy rather than particular doctrinal beliefs or levels of anger/aggressiveness really helped me understand fundamentalism in a broader way. I agree with you that the more chaotic the world seems, the more people are willing to ignore their former morals/virtues/critical thinking in favor of a person or idea that claims to Just Fix It Already. It is quite a challenge to figure out how global instability and chaos can turn us toward compassion, equity, and critical thought and not away from it.