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Fundamentalism The very best stories always happened somewhere, and sometime, else. “Once upon a time,…” or “Long ago and far away,” (the first words of today’s story for children), or “In the beginning,…” (those words will be familiar to those of you who are participating in our Understanding the Bible class). And these are not necessarily made-up stories, or untrue; often they are true in a timeless and universal way that stretches our minds and challenges our understandings as contemporary stories may not. And so our story, too, will begin in the past; in a long-ago time when the world seemed more whole, more organic, and more constant than perhaps it does today. Historian of religion Karen
Armstrong suggests that “[w]e tend to assume that people of the past were
(more or less) like us, but in fact their spiritual lives were rather
different.” In her book The Battle for God, she describes the old forms
of religion whose roots grow deep in the soil of premodern agrarian civilization;
“old-time” religions which include Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. She
sets the stage in these words: In particular, [the people of the past]
evolved two ways of thinking, speaking and acquiring knowledge, which
scholars have called mythos and logos. Both were essential; they were
regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its
special area of competence. Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned
with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth
looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and
to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical
matters, but with meaning. …The mythos of a society provided people with
a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their
attention to the eternal and universal. It was also rooted in what we
would call the unconscious mind. [Karen Armstrong. 2000. The Battle for
God. p. xv]. And mythos, the primary form of discourse in the premodern world, “directing attention to the sacred beginnings, to a primordial event, … to the foundations of human life,” [The Battle for God p. 35] was profoundly conservative. It served to ground and accommodate people to a world in which a drought or a flood, a plague or an invasion could decimate a community or eliminate a culture. “It creates,” in Karen Armstrong’s words again, “ a cast of mind that adapts and conforms to the way things are. This was essential in a society that could not sustain untrammeled innovation.” [The Battle for God p. 35] But time has not stood still, and over the last 500 years a profound transformation has occurred in Europe and America; a transformation that has shifted our attention from the past to the future, from stability to progress, from mythos to logos. The repercussions of this transformation radiate outward with inescapable effect on people near and far. Karen Armstrong calls the transformation “modernization.” Explorers, scientists, thinkers, new technologies; these revealed new lands and cultures, new stars and planets in the skies, microscopic organisms never seen before, new medical treatments, new agricultural practices. These in turn spawned new forms of manufacturing (a word that literally means “making by hand”), of commerce and banking, of learning, of thinking. The modern culture is infused with such ideals as democracy, toleration, humanism, pragmatism, empiricism, rationalism. These “[contradict] the dynamic of the old mythical spirituality,” and already by the eighteenth century people (and I quote Karen Armstrong again) “began to think that logos was the only means to truth and began to discount mythos as false and superstitious.”[The Battle for God, p. xvii] Many in our world have embraced the scientific, technological, and secularist values of modernity, and many have experienced the transformation with alarm or despair or worse. Galileo’s telescope confirmed the Copernican view that the earth was not the center of the universe, but one among several planets orbiting the sun; Galileo himself was condemned by the Church whose cosmology was thus undermined. The industrial revolution brought unprecedented prosperity – and the hideous slums that assaulted human health, dignity, and hope. The Suez Canal brought modern European transportation and technology and culture to Muslim Egypt, at an enormous cost to the fragile Egyptian economic and social structure; likewise, the British introduction of oil technology into Iran irrevocably destabilized the Muslim society there. Medical and technological advances made the trench warfare and mustard gas and unimaginable destructiveness of the First World War possible, and revealed what has been called “the lethal and destructive tendency of the modern spirit” [The Battle for God, p. 167]. The horrors of the Second World War: the mechanized fighting, the death camps of the Holocaust, the mushroom clouds rising over Hiroshima and Nagasaki stand as testimony to the appalling shortcomings of logos alone as a guide for human living. In the face of the inexorable
progress of modernism, with its logos of rationalism and secularism not
balanced by a complementary mythos to infuse a transcendent sense of order,
compassion and meaning into living, a thoroughly modern response has emerged
within every major religious tradition. Taking their name from The Fundamentals,
a series of carefully- (logically-, reasonably-) written pamphlets published
by conservative American Protestant theologians between 1910 and 1915,
and intended to clarify the fundamental tenets of Protestant doctrine,
these movements are collectively known as “fundamentalisms.” Fundamentalist
groups are found in Protestant Christianity, in Judaism, in Islam, in
Buddhism, and Hinduism. Despite differences in beliefs, tactics, and strategies
from one tradition and one community to another, Karen Armstrong contends
that “Fundamentalisms all follow a certain pattern. They are embattled
forms of spirituality, which have emerged as a response to a perceived
crisis. They are engaged in a conflict with enemies whose secularist policies
and beliefs seem inimical to religion itself. Fundamentalists … [experience
this battle] as a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil. They
fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identity by means
of a selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past.”
[The Battle for God, p. xiii] The pattern usually includes withdrawing
from mainstream society to create a counterculture uncontaminated by secular
evil, refining “fundamental” doctrines and practices to create an ideology
that provides the faithful with a plan of action, and eventually fighting
back in an attempt to resacralize an increasingly skeptical world. In
many cases, fundamentalists attempt to convert the mythos of their religion
into a logos, a conflation of two different intelligences that invariably
leads to disaster. Even the most poetic and metaphorical of stories harden
into a literal interpretation that allows As fundamentalist movements mature, an impassable gulf opens up between them and the mainstream culture from which they spring. The divergence springs not from the logical, rational level of thought and understanding, but from a deeper and more instinctual level of mind, not amenable to discussion or compromise. Indeed, fundamentalisms are informed by what Karen Armstrong calls “a conviction that some groups will never be able to understand the ideology, because they have been infected by a ‘false consciousness.’” [The Battle for God, p. 234] The society is racked by a clash between two groups, two cultures, two nations, at least one of which sees itself as battling for its life – and often the very future of humankind. Charles Kimball, an ordained Baptist minister and professor of religion at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, writes in his 2002 book When Religion Becomes Evil about the five major warning signs of human corruption of religion. His terminology differs somewhat from Karen Armstrong’s, but he, too, is writing about fundamentalisms, primarily in , Islam, and Christianity. Kimball begins with the understanding that “[a]t the heart of all authentic, healthy, life-sustaining religions, one always finds … both an orientation toward God or the transcendent and compassionate, constructive relationships with others in this world.” [Charles Kimball. 2002. When Religion Becomes Evil, p. 39] Beyond this, they provide for their adherents a spiritual compass with God or the transcendent, faith, hope and love as the cardinal directions; a compass, which, if consulted, offers, some form of the golden rule as a guiding principle. [When Religion Becomes Evil, p. 193] Religions which have become evil move away from this focus on compassion and reconciliation and exhibit one or more of the following traits: absolute truth claims, blind obedience, establishing (looking forward or backward to) an “Ideal” time, a conviction that the end justifies any means, or declaring holy war. Understanding religion as “arguably the most powerful and pervasive force on earth,” [When Religion Becomes Evil. p. 1] Kimball recognizes that such corrupt or “evil” manifestations of religion carry enormous power to damage people and societies. Whether we view them as “religions become evil” or as shocked and fearful responses to the supplanting of religion by reason, I venture to say that each of us has experienced, directly or indirectly, the pain that fundamentalisms and their subscribers can inflict. Who among us will ever forget the attacks on the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon – larger-than-life symbols of modernity – by Muslim fundamentalists? Who among us has not felt the sting of a Christian fundamentalist neighbor or relative disparaging Unitarian Universalism, our quintessentially modern fellowship of reasoned seekers, as an overly-rational, insufficiently “religious” faith, one that, in the words of a letter to the editor published in a recent issue of The Venture, “make[s] reference to ‘congregations and ministries’ yet noticeably missing is any reference to God.” [Louis Call, New Bern, NC. Sept. 15, 2004. The Venture, p. 1] Who has not recoiled from these overwhelming or annoying assaults? Thus the withdrawal continues, the gulf widens, defensiveness grows into self-righteousness, and the teachings of compassion – the golden rule – are lost in dueling defensivenesses, escalating isolation. How can we respond otherwise? “What can,” in Karen Armstrong’s words, “the liberal, secular establishment do to build bridges [across that widening, deepening chasm] and avert the possibility of future battles? And she begins her answer with the logical, if not intuitive, observation: “Suppression and coercion are clearly not the answer. They invariably lead to a backlash and make fundamentalists or potential fundamentalist more extreme.” [The Battle for God p. 368.] We must begin not with emotion but with reason, with understanding, with the deeply religious values (regardless of how we label them) of care and compassion. We can begin by recognizing that fundamentalist theologies and ideologies are rooted in fear, in a deep-seated terror of extinction of all that is mysterious and holy and whole, at the hands of unbridled modernism. We can approach fundamentalists with compassion, as individuals with whom we have, in the words of William Sloane Coffin, “more in common than in conflict, [recognizing] that it is precisely when what [we] have in conflict seems overriding that what [we] have in common needs most to be affirmed. Human rights are more important than the politics of identity, and religious people should be notorious boundary crossers.” [From Coffin. 1993. A Passion for the Possible quoted in Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil, p. 199] We can cross the boundaries of alienation and rejection, recognizing that fundamentalist countercultures reveal needs, lacks, and oversights not sufficiently addressed by the mainstream culture. Although distorted by fear and rage, the alternative ideologies and societies created by fundamentalists reveal the roots of their disillusion with a culture that could not easily accommodate the spiritual. We can “address [ourselves] more empathetically to the fears, anxieties, and needs” which inform the lives of our fundamentalist neighbors, responding with compassion, not defensiveness, and with “the benevolence, tolerance, and respect for humanity that characterizes modern culture at its best.” [The Battle for God, pp. 368-71] We can rise to the challenge of the Golden Rule, however we choose to articulate and attribute it, and “lead the way in transforming conflict and helping to bring about reconciliation,” [When Religion Becomes Evil, pp. 212-13] reaching out to work together for the common good in our families and neighborhoods, as well as in the larger circles in which we move. One person, one relationship at a time, we can work to enlarge these circles, to include others, however different, inside the boundaries of “us,” until the boundaries between “us” and “them,” and the threat those boundaries represent, begin to give way in a restoration of that more whole, more organic, more constant world not of “Long ago and far away,” but of some hopeful, holy new day. May it be so. And may we begin now, not in words, not in action, but in a period of silent reflection. The bell will lead us into silence, and music will lead us out. Silence Music Amen and blessed be.
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