The role of religion in our politics has been growing steadily and the strongest religious voices have been on the religious right who after decades of shunning politics decided to enter into the fray wholeheartedly in the 1980s. According to fundamentalist Christian leaders like Pat Robertson the problems in the United States are the fault of the mainstream culture. In the minds of many fundamentalists, 9/11 happened because Americans have been too tolerant and too accepting of abortion and homosexuality. They want to stamp out the culture that they see is so dangerous and compel Americans to follow their scripture or to be condemned.
Ironically, one of their biggest fights with the American mainstream society is how difficult it has been to keep their children in the fundamentalist camp when they grow up. Fundamentalists have invested a great deal into trying to make sure their children are not polluted by the sinful world. They’ve created a parallel mass media where they can see and hear only godly programs. They’ve put on huge rallies and concerts providing Christian entertainment and music. And they’ve created a separate press that publishes Christian novels and magazines. Indeed, home-schooling was started largely in response to the “godless” culture which was so seductive to the children of the Christian fundamentalists.
Nevertheless, no matter how hard they have tried to build a haven where alien ideas are not allowed and unquestioning faith rules, many of their children have abandoned their faith. Why is that?
The Christian right believes it is because Satan is too strong, particularly in our godless American culture. And this causes them to be even more adamant that they must control all aspects of life and the government including the school boards, the city councils, the state houses and the federal government.
But is that true? Dr. Bob Altemeyer says no. Bob Altemeyer, a social psychologist and researcher at University of Manitoba, has conducted a large body of research that has studied Christian fundamentalists as a part of his larger research into authoritarian personalities. (Altemeyer’s research was featured in John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience, where John Dean, a life-long conservative and counsel to Richard Nixon during the Watergate years, sought to discover the roots to the problems afflicting the conservative movement and its dangerous effects on the Republican Party.)
Through his research using surveys of parents and children of fundamentalist households, Bob Altemeyer found that fundamentalist families have a particularly poor track record in passing their beliefs down to their descendents. He found that the children are vulnerable in three areas (pdf, pages 130-131).
“Christian fundamentalism has three great enemies in the struggle to retain its children, judging by the stories its apostates tell: weaknesses in its own teachings, science, and hypocrisy.”
For the first problem: when the Bible is actually read, the actual text causes problems for the discerning reader. “The Bible was, they said, too often inconsistent, petty, boring, appalling, self-serving, or unbelievable.” Altemeyer found that although many fundamentalist Christians profess allegiance to an inerrant Bible, very few have actually read it completely for themselves and some who do find the inconsistencies too great.
For the second problem: for some, science makes too much sense and where the Bible was out of step with science, for people who find the logic of science compelling, the decree from the pulpit to ignore and disbelieve science is too much.
“Science made too much sense and had pushed traditional beliefs into a tight corner. When their church insisted that its version of creation, the story of Adam and Eve, the sundry miracles and so on had to be taken on faith, the fledgling apostates eventually found that preposterous. Faith for them was not a virtue, although they could see why their religion taught people it was. It meant surrendering rationality. From its earliest days fundamentalism has drawn a line in the sand over scripture versus science, and some of its young people eventually felt they had to step over the line, and then they kept right on going.”
And finally in regards to the third problem, for some, what they learned from their families and from the pulpit was how valuable integrity and truthfulness was in defining one’s character. And the implacable demand that one submit their belief and their reason to something they found irrational became too much. Here’s how Altemeyer described the problem:
“Their families will say it was Satan. But we thought, after interviewing dozens of “amazing apostates,” that (most ironically) their religious training had made them leave. Their church had told them it was God’s true religion. That’s what made it so right, so much better than all the others. It had the truth, it spoke the truth, it was The Truth. But that emphasis can create in some people a tremendous valuing of truth per se, especially among highly intelligent youth who have been rewarded all their lives for getting “the right answer.” So if the religion itself begins making less and less sense, it fails by the very criterion that it set up to show its superiority.
Similarly, pretending to believe the unbelievable violated the integrity that had brought praise to the amazing apostates as children. Their consciences, thoroughly developed by their upbringing, made it hard for them to bear false witness. So again they were essentially trapped by their religious training. It had worked too well for them to stay in the home religion, given the problems they saw with it.”
Is Altemeyer correct? Anecdotal evidence says yes. One of the more thoughtful bloggers writing about ethics and morality on the web is Fred Clark, the proprietor of Slacktivist. Fred is a gifted writer who is deeply engaged as an evangelical Christian in discussing what it means to live as a true Christian. Recently he wrote about what caused him to reject the teachings of his family’s faith where homosexuality and evolution were condemned.
“In the footnote to the previous post, I mentioned an epiphany of sorts that occurred when I was confronted with the disparity between the "trap street" [Ed: an imaginary street shown on the map to detect copyright violation] shown on my county road atlas and the actual terrain of the actual county. The analogy is not precisely perfect, but that disparity between the map and the terrain somewhat paralleled the disparities I was also encountering between the text of scripture and the actual world around me.
So there I was, at the end of what was, undeniably, a dead end street, consulting a map that claimed otherwise. It was something of a Groucho moment: "Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?" I sided with my own two eyes, thus accepting the principle that reason and experience were essential considerations for evaluating the meaning and application of the text. In a sense, I was fumbling my way toward something like Wesley's "four-legged stool."
No one was claiming, of course, that my county road atlas ought to be read as the inerrant, infallible and authoritative Word of God, so my fundamentalist teachers would not have disagreed with my choosing, in this case, to regard my own experience of the terrain as worthy of consideration.
Nor did they deny that I would encounter similar disparities when consulting the "map" of scripture. In that case, however, they taught that I must always side with the map. That is what it means to be a fundamentalist.
Thus, to cite one of the more infamous examples, we were taught that evolution was a lie. The map, the Bible, said that the world was only 6,000 years old, and if that's what the map says, then this must trump any claims of "science" or any other observation about so-called reality. If reality and the map conflict, then we must reinterpret reality to conform to the map.”
Fundamentalism has gained enormous power in our country today. Yet, fundamentalism continues to have a hard row to hoe in gaining a majority in the United States without a severe disruption occurring. Altemeyer’s observation that fundamentalism has some inherent flaws that will keep it from becoming the overwhelming worldview is reassuring. Because we are now seeing how far the Christian Right will go to create a world walled off from alien (liberal and scientific) thoughts. What Altemeyer’s research tells us is that despite the attempt to create a fundamentalist haven where no dissenting thoughts are allowed, there is still a reservoir of common sense that will resist the pressure to reject reality. Nevertheless, we need to find ways to make it easier for people to resist the lure of fundamentalism which paints a picture of black and white, the rejection of rationality and promises an end that satisfies the apocalyptic dreams of those who are targets for enrollment into the fundamentalist fantasy.
[Ed: This was one of my articles written for the Vox Populi Nebraska eZine first published in the March 2007 issue.]
Comments (3)
Terrific article, Mary. So the problem the fundamentalists have with science is not just that the theory of evolution might be seen as contradicting the Biblical story of creation (if one doesn't allow for l---o---n---g days in God's time). Rather, the very process of rational, analytic thought is seductive, luring people into apostasy. Great!
I've always been struck by how four-year-olds get into questioning mode: "Why this? Why that? And why that?" It can get tiresome for adults, who are tempted finally just to say, "Because I said so." Far better for the adult to say, "I don't know--let's see if we can find out," or even, "I don't know, and I'm so tired of thinking about this, I'd rather do something else. What else would you like to do?" Thinking about how we raise children and interact with children whom we aren't raising may be a rewarding new frontier for progressives and open-minded folks of all political stripes to explore.
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April 19, 2007 5:20 PM
Posted on April 19, 2007 17:20
Great article, Mary. As a member of a community of faith and an interfaith organizer, I resonate strongly with your message about the fundamentalist Right. When did Jesus become the poster child for corporate lobbyists and oil barons? Progressive people of faith are already resisting the fundamentalist message machine publicly, and I hope this continues.
I am reading an excellent book by John Dominic Crossan, who I consider to be the greatest living historical Jesus scholar. It's called "God & Empire: Jesus against Rome, then and now." It paints a compelling portrait of the earliest Jesus movement and first century Christianity as an anti-imperial movement. Caesar was openly proclaimed as "God," "Son of God," and "Savior" in the public spaces of the time. Jesus proclaimed a Kingdom of God (basiliae, best translated from the Greek as "imperial rule" rather than kingdom), and was executed by the Romans. Yes, the Romans - the author of the Gospel of Luke was a Roman citizen writing for an audience of Roman citizens, and inserted much anti-semitic revisionism to get Pontius Pilate off the hook.
Paul openly proclaimed a Christ whose message was a direct challenge to imperial claims. Crossan demonstrates how the early Christian church inserted Neo-Pauline authors to correct the radical Paul, and replace him with a liberal, then conservative Paul.
First century Galilee was a commercialized, urbanized, and Romanized economic environment riddled with dispossessed farmers and systemic debt. (So unlike our own time...) The Jesus movement presented an "already here," "here and now" kingdom of God in which open table fellowship and a bed were exchanged for healing. It was a radically hospitable paradigm that stood in direct opposition to the client and patronage system of the Roman empire. The apocalyptic Jesus came later - an imposition of the early Christian Church.
How repulsed 21st century American fundamentalists would be if they met Jesus of Nazareth face to face. He sat down to dinner with the people they despise most - and violated serious social taboos and purity codes doing it. Think about the difference between giving a homeless person a handout and inviting him to have dinner with you and your friends.
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July 23, 2007 2:05 PM
Posted on July 23, 2007 14:05
Your article touches on many of my personal interests, Mary. It’s high time that progressive Christians reclaimed the public spaces and stood up to the Christian Right — because fundamentalist views don’t speak for us, and they speak even less for the historical Jesus of Nazareth. I’m reading an excellent book by John Dominic Crossan, probably the greatest historical Jesus scholar of our time, or any other. The title is God & Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now. He makes three main points that address the disjunction between theology and reality that you describe in your article:
1. Civilization’s normalcy cannot exist without violence, or the threat of violence;
2. Judeo-Christian images of the divine have always included a violent, retributive God on the one hand, and a nonviolent, merciful God on the other. This is as true of the Christian New Testament as it is of Hebrew scripture. These contradictory images coexist independently, developed in parallel by authors with radically different theologies and world views.
3. Christians must choose between the violent God of the Book of Revelation and the nonviolent God of Jesus and Paul.
From the earliest Babylonian creation myths to the Left Behind series, the mythology of redemptive violence has traveled hand in hand with the mythology of nonviolent justice. Empires proclaim peace through victory, while saints and sages proclaim peace through justice. The literalism that fundamentalism proclaims is a much more effective ideology for maintaining elitism and kleptocracy, because it frames the systemic exploitation and violence of human history as divine mandate. In the words of Crossan, the Book of Revelation “deradicalizes the nonviolent Jesus on the donkey by transforming him into the violent Jesus on the battle stallion.”
The fundamentalist Right would reject Jesus of Nazareth again if he appeared in their churches. I daresay they would be as repulsed by him as were the literalists and elitists of first-century Palestine. He sat down to dinner with the same social outcasts, government bureaucrats, and transgressors of sexual taboos that conservatives revile at every opportunity. If he were alive today (and some might claim that he is), Jesus would be about the business of embracing diversity, designing programs that heal psycho-social diseases, and relieving economic pressures on families caused by commercialization and systemic debt. What he did then, he would do now. Some would worship him, some would ridicule him, and some would kill him.
Jesus proclaimed an already-present, here-and-now Kingdom of God in direct opposition to the imperial theology that defined Roman culture. Most English translations of the bible use the phrase “Kingdom of God” for the Greek “basileia tou theou.” A more precise translation is “Imperial Rule of God.” Basileia, in the Greek-speaking Roman empire, was the office and power of an absolute monarch, used for Roman emperors beginning with Augustus. Jesus’ alternative vision of a world with God in charge was not lost on the Romans, and they executed him. In Crossan’s view (and mine), Christians today are “bound to whichever of these visions was incarnated by and in the historical Jesus.”
Twenty years later Saul of Tarsus appears on the scene. Few are aware that massive scholarly consensus tells us that only seven of the thirteen New Testament letters attributed to Paul were written by Paul himself. Neo-Pauline letters inserted later by the early church transform him from a radically egalitarian Paul who welcomed women into his ministry to a liberal, then conservative Paul who told women to be quiet in church and obey their husbands. Admonitions to wealthy members of his congregations about how they treated the poor, entreaties to free Christian slaves, and proclamations of equality in Christ Jesus give way to a progressively liberal, then conservative agenda.
Fewer still are aware that Roman inscriptions throughout the empire proclaimed Augustus Caesar as “God,” “Son of God,” and “Savior.” Paul’s message was also hard to miss, and it is likely that he also died at the hands of the Romans. The ultimate irony of Christianity’s eventual merger with the Roman empire under Constantine is that the voiceprints of Jesus and Paul survived, despite the inevitable impositions of orthodoxy.
Progressive Christians have been silent too often and too long in an American public discourse dominated by the harsh, punitive, and violent messages of the Christian Right. We are called to better understand the roots of our tradition, and challenge the fundamentalist view of God as an archetypal strict father who cannot be appeased except by the torture and blood sacrifice of his son.
As those responsible for bringing Judeo-Christian culture into the 21st century, we must also reject the presumed inevitability of violence and injustice, and the nihilistic embrace of world destruction as fulfillment of prophecy. It is worthwhile to remind ourselves that even post-modern, secular European culture is an extension of Judeo-Christian culture. We live in the justice-seeking and deeply ecological branches of the tree. Our mission is to proclaim the images of divine mercy and justice found in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos — and to embody the nonviolent resistance and radical egalitarianism of Jesus and Paul.
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July 28, 2007 10:25 PM
Posted on July 28, 2007 22:25