Fundamentalism and the Follies of the Left

Fundamentalism is another word for spiritual and metaphysical infantilism. The same thing that we treat as a psychological disorder when it manifests emotionally and as a learning disorder when it manifests intellectually we tolerate as a legitimate interpretation of spiritual traditions and texts when it manifests in church. We on the Left are especially prone to this deference, an impulse that is otherwise noble: as spiritual matters are not, by nature, measurable, we are reluctant to judge them. We also view them as being intensely personal, a very Age of Reason approach, and one in keeping with the majority Protestant makeup of our country.
We take the “you go your way, I’ll go mine” approach from the same longstanding liberal tradition that spawned the First Amendment’s “establishment clause” that guarantees the separation of church and state. It’s not merely on theoretical civil liberties grounds that we choose this approach: for practical reasons, we think that we’ll keep the militants and the zanies from seizing power if we let them practice their militancy and zaniness in the relative privacy of their own houses of worship. Making them paranoid of persecution will only make them want to horde weapons, and the results of that are unlikely to be pleasant.
Lefties are also understandably creeped out by the idea that anybody should have the right to tell anybody else how to think about God or how to worship. Among the rights our freedom affords us, we hope, is the right to a healthy conscience.
But in ceding the legal ground, as we must if we wish to maintain our own right to worship (or not) as we please, we also too often give up the right to genuine theological and metaphysical debate. We may think that fundamentalists are wrong or wrongheaded, but too often we’re afraid to tell them so and too often we’re afraid to tell them why we think so. This is unfortunate, as that same First Amendment that protects religious practice also protects speech. And the reason they are both protected is just so we can have rousing debates in the public square about these issues. The idea is that freedom of speech fosters an open forum of ideas and that those that are deemed best will eventually win out over those that are not. Rather than having the guts to enter this forum, though, liberals too often misinterpret the intentions of the First Amendment and self-censor. The First Amendment is not meant to let those whose ideas are wrong remain unchallenged; it is meant to create a space for that challenge to happen in an open and civilized way.
But the fundamentalists also do their best to make us afraid to call bad theology by its name. They have learned well from the Left-sourced politics of victimization and know very well how to cry persecution every time they are called out. Evidence of this can be seen in the spots run by the Alliance Defense Fund that have been running locally. The spots use clips of speeches by JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ronald Reagan with references to a deity bleeped out in order to claim that God is being censored from the public sphere. The spots refer viewers to the organization’s website at which all the usual bogeymen of the religious Right are accused of all the things they’ve always been accused of. They especially hate the ACLU, of course, for bothering to try to keep the wall separating church and state tight and high.
Such screeching tends to shut down debate from the Left as it still tries desperately to reclaim churchgoers after the “values voters” debacles that were the general elections of 2000 and 2004. Liberals don’t want to appear to be “attacking God” any more than they want to appear to be “not supporting the troops” when they vote to finally do something (or not) about funding the war in Iraq.
Liberals quickly cede the debate, too, because we’re frequently unable to think ourselves out of the false dilemmas fundamentalist arguments put us in: speaking out against the abuse of religion in the public sphere = being against God; disallowing state sponsorship of religion = censorship. We’re stymied by our lack of confidence in the American people’s ability to comprehend or even listen to a complex argument about how Jesus and liberal thought are compatible and how a secular government can actually uphold and protect faith’s free exercise.
And so fundamentalists get to throw their little tantrums, get to claim that they are an embattled minority when they control two branches of government, and get their screams echoed so often they start to take on the sheen of common knowledge.
This, despite the safe assertion that most all fundamentalism is theologically and metaphysically untenable, that its interpretation of scripture is inconsistent and lacks scholarly merit, that its goals owe more to furthering a political agenda than a spiritual one. I am always amazed at the number of new pastoral ministries students who are at first aghast at the fact that few, if any, serious biblical scholars have a strict and literal interpretation of the bible. Of course, scholars actually read the darn thing and ask difficult questions about its origins, creators, motives, and inconsistencies. That’s their job, and it’s a grown-up one—a job therefore anathema to fundamentalists who wish to keep theology at the level of a four-year old, with heaven “up there” and hell “down there” and God a big male Caucasian in the sky sporting white robes and a long, flowing, white beard.
Before the Kansas School Board again tries to give credence to the idea that the Earth is 6006 years old and that evolution is a “myth,” before the U.S. gets drawn into trying to make the embattled Holy Land a literal Armageddon, before we let Liberty University pack the courts with fundamentalist justices, the Left needs to use that forum guaranteed by the First Amendment to say not “well, that’s just your opinion” but to say “you have every right to it, but your opinion is wrong.” The Left must combat superstition and self-imposed infantilism with reason and grown-up religious scholarship. We must do it openly, forcefully, publicly, and, yes, lovingly. Lovingly does not rule out angrily, and we need to do that too. But first, we need to have the tiny seed of faith required to believe that The People are capable and willing to hear what we say.

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