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READING:
(from The Battle for God, by Karen Armstrong)
"One of the most startling developments of the late-20th century has
been the emergence within every major religious tradition of a militant
piety popularly known as "fundamentalism." Its manifestations are
sometimes shocking. Around the world, Fundamentalists have gunned down
worshippers in a mosque, have killed doctors and nurses who work in
abortion clinics, have shot their presidents, and have even toppled a
powerful government. It is only a small minority of fundamentalists who
commit such acts of terror, but even the most peaceful and law-abiding
are perplexing, because they seem so adamantly opposed to many of the
positive values of modern society. Fundamentalists have no time for
democracy, pluralism, religious toleration, peacekeeping, free speech,
or the separation of church and state. Christian fundamentalists reject
the discoveries of biology and physics about the origins of life and
insist that the Book of Genesis is scientifically sound in every detail.
Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists both now interpret the Arab-Israeli
conflict, which began as defiantly secularist, in an exclusively
religious way, fighting and killing to bring the sacred into the realm
of politics and national struggle."
"This
religious resurgence has taken many observers by surprise. In the middle
years of the 20th century, it was generally taken for granted that
secularism was an irreversible trend and that faith would never again
play a major part in world events. It was assumed that as human beings
became more rational, they either would have no further need for
religion or would be content to confine it to the immediately personal
and private areas of their lives. But in the late-1970s, fundamentalists
began to rebel against this secular hegemony and started to wrest
religion out of its marginal position and back to center stage. In this,
at least, they have enjoyed remarkable success. Religion has once again
become a force that no government can safely ignore. Fundamentalism is
now an essential part of the modern scene and will certainly play an
important role in the domestic and international affairs of the future.
It is crucial, therefore, that we try to understand what this type of
religiosity means, how and for what reasons it has developed, what it
can tell us about our culture, and how best we should deal with it."
MEDITATION:
(the first lines of the poem "The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats, 1920)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction,
while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
MESSAGE:
 hroughout history, in
every age and in every culture, there have always been people that
resist the new ways of their day. In the 20th century, one such
resistance became known as Fundamentalism, which is essentially a
reaction against the scientific and secular culture of a Western
civilization that changed the world; nothing—including religion—would
ever be the same again, and people are still struggling with these new
conditions, forced to reassess their own faith traditions that had been
designed for an entirely different type of society.
There was a transitional period in the ancient world, lasting roughly
from 700 BCE to 200 BCE, which historians call the Axial Age because it
was pivotal to the spiritual development of humankind. During this
period, people began to grow crops beyond their immediate needs,
creating surpluses that could be marketed for extra income. This enabled
them to build the first civilizations, develop the arts, and create
increasingly powerful cities and, eventually, empires. Power no longer
lay with the local king or priest but shifted to the marketplace, the
source of wealth for each culture. In such drastically changed
circumstances, people began to feel that their old pagan cults, which
had served their ancestors well, no longer fully met the needs of their
new day.
With more leisure to develop their inner lives, instead of seeing the
divine embodied in a number of different deities, they began to worship
a single Source. Because of the inequities experienced in the agrarian
culture that preceded them, prophets and reformers of this Axial Age,
began to see the sacred in human beings and they insisted that all
should be willing to care for the more vulnerable in their midst. The
great religions that have continued to guide humanity sprang up during
this time: Buddhism and Hinduism in India, Confucianism and Taoism in
the Far East, the first of the Abrahamic faiths in the Middle East.
Despite their differences, these had much in common: they all built on
old traditions to cultivate an internalized spirituality, evolving the
idea of a universal transcendence and stressing the importance of
practical compassion.
In our day, we have a similar period of transition. Beginning in the
16th and 17th centuries of the modern era, the people of Western Europe
began to evolve a different type of society, one based not on
agricultural surplus but on a technology that enabled reproduction of
resources. These economic changes over the past 400 years have been
accompanied by great social, political and intellectual revolutions,
with the development of an entirely different—a scientific and
rational—concept of nature and its universal truths…and, once again,
radical religious change became inevitable. All over the world, people
discovered that their old forms of faith no longer worked for them and,
like the reformers of the Axial Age, they are attempting to build upon
the insights and traditions of the past to take them into this new
world. Along with such religions as Universalism and Unitarianism and
the New Thought religions like Christian Science, Unity Church and
Religious Science, another such modern religious experiment is
fundamentalism.
From the beginning, people have evolved spiritually in two ways,
inspired by what scholars call mythos and logos. Both are essential and
serve as complementary ways of arriving at the truth, but each has a
special function. In the 2,500 years from the Axial Age up to the
Enlightenment, mythos was primary: it looked to the origins of life, to
the foundations of culture, to the deepest levels of the mind. Myth was
not concerned with practical day-to-day matters but with meaning. Human
beings find it almost impossible to live without a sense that life has
some ultimate purpose and value. The mythos of a culture provided people
with a context to make sense of their lives, directing attention away
from their everyday personal problems to the eternal and the universal.
Mythological stories were not meant to be taken literally; they served
as an ancient form of psychology, bringing to light archetypal struggles
for guidance from realms not accessible to the purely rational.
People then had a different view of history: they were less interested
in what actually happened than with the meaning of the event. Incidents
were not seen as unique occurrences but as manifestations of a constant,
timeless reality, history having to repeat itself because there was
nothing new under the sun. Historical narratives were written as myth in
order to emphasize their deeper truths. For example, take the story of
the Israelites escape from Egypt through the Sea of Reeds: to demand
evidence to prove that the Exodus actually happened as recorded in the
Hebrew Bible is to mistake the nature and the purpose of the story; it
is to confuse mythos with logos.
Unlike mythos, logos must relate exactly to facts and must be practical
and work efficiently to enable men and women to function well in the
ordinary, everyday world. While mythos looks back to beginnings and
foundations, logos looks ahead, trying to find something new, something
better. You were not supposed to make mythos the basis of a pragmatic
policy; if you did, the results were disastrous as, for example, with
the latter Christian crusades of the Dark Ages, or the absolute, extreme
policies of the Taliban today in Afghanistan: what works in the inner
world is not applicable to the affairs of the outer world.
By the 18th century, however, the people of the Western world had
achieved such astonishing success in science and technology that they
began to think that logos was the only means to truth, discounting
mythos as false and superstitious. But, while logos could make things
work efficiently and discover wonderful new facts about the universe and
its inhabitants, it could not assuage pain or sorrow, it could not
answer questions about the meaning or ultimate value of human existence;
that was the realm of myth. Still, religious emphasis in the modern
world changed and, to counter the increasing number (including most
Unitarians and Universalists) who regarded scientific rationalism alone
as true, others tried to turn the mythos of their faith into logos: and
that is precisely what the fundamentalists have attempted to do, turn
mythos into logos.
Modernization has always been painful: many people feel lost and
alienated when fundamental changes make their world unrecognizable.
Those of us who relish the freedoms and achievements and opportunities
of our time find it impossible to comprehend the distress these very
same things cause religious fundamentalists. For them, this modern age
is experienced not as advancement but as an aggressive assault; they
feel they are battling forces that threaten their most sacred values. So
let us try to understand their perceptions and their pain.
By the end of the 19th century, it was clear that the great promises of
the Enlightenment—of unlimited progress and full equality for all—were
not going to be a reality. The dynamic optimism that had inspired this
new Axial Age had given way to doubt and malaise; at the same time they
celebrated the achievements of modern society, men and women experienced
an emptiness that questioned life’s meaning and purpose. The Great War
of 1914 showed a self-destructive tendency in the modern spirit, a
generation of young men decimated and Europe damaged to its core. After
that, no rational person could be unfailingly optimistic about the
future of Western civilization.
As a result, in every field of human endeavor the most creative thinkers
became obsessed to create the world anew, breaking free from the forms
of the past. In both the arts and the sciences, there was a movement
back to first principles, to irreducible fundamentals. Artists turned to
cubism, for example, while physicists searched for the atom;
sociologists reverted to the study of primeval societies while
psychologists analyzed the primal mind. This was not like the
conservative desire to recreate the past but a way to smash it apart, to
create something entirely new. The horror and fear from the First World
War lent an urgency to search for something that could save humanity.
In the early 20th century, just as people in the first Axial Age had
found that the old paganism no longer worked in their new conditions and
had thus evolved the great confessional faiths, so, too, in this new
Axial Age, there was a similar challenge. Protestants in the United
States had been aware for some time of the need for something new. Both
liberal and conservative denominations were committed to the social
programs of the Progressive Age (1900-1920), developing what they called
the "Social Gospel" as a way to make sacred the godless cities and
factories, attempting to return to the basics of the Jewish prophets and
of Christ, himself, providing services and facilities for the poor and
the immigrants.
But the beginning of the beginning of American fundamentalism was an
address delivered in 1909 by a Unitarian, Charles Eliot, of Harvard,
entitled "The Future of Religion" which struck a wooden stake into the
hearts of conservatives. It was an attempt, again, to return to a simple
core value: the new religion, Eliot believed, would have only one
commandment, the love of God expressed in service to others. (sound
familiar?) Eliot went on to preach a vision where there would be no need
for churches, no need, even, for scriptures, no theology of sin and
redemption, because God's presence would be so overwhelming. The
religion of the future would be like such secular ideals as democracy,
public education, social reform, and preventive medicine, Eliot trying
to get back to what he regarded as fundamental: love of God and
neighbor, something all the world's religions have emphasized, the
importance of compassion for the least of us, for social justice and
care of the vulnerable. Eliot wanted to build a faith that relied upon
practice rather than dogma. (Again, do these words from 95 years ago
sound familiar today?)
Well, of course, conservatives were appalled. Faith without doctrine was
not Christianity, and they had to counter this liberal danger. Enter
millionaire oilmen, Lyman and Milton Stewart, founders of the Bible
College of Los Angeles: between 1910 and 1915 they issued a series of
twelve pamphlets entitled The Fundamentals, some three million copies of
each volume sent free of charge to every pastor, professor, and theology
student in America. Later, fundamentalists would claim this as the start
of their movement, but at the time, the pamphlets caused little critical
interest.
Americans have always had a tendency to see any conflict as apocalyptic,
and World War I confirmed conservative’s worst fears; such horrific
slaughter, they decided, could only be the beginning of the End Times,
the battles foretold in the Book of Revelation. What had, before Eliot's
address, been merely doctrinal disputes with liberals now became a
struggle for the future of civilization; fundamentalists saw themselves
on the front line against satanic forces that would soon destroy the
world. There was no longer any room for reconciliation; rationalism and
its fruits (the Great War and the Social Gospel) now had the aura of
absolute evil. The literal truth of scripture and the infallibility of
doctrine were matters of life and death; any attacks on the Bible would
result in anarchy and the total collapse of civilization, one Baptist
minister declared in a famous sermon entitled "Will New York City Be
Destroyed If It Does Not Repent?" The conflict had gotten out of hand
and it would be impossible to heal the rift.
Most fundamentalists were either Baptists or Presbyterians, and it was
there that the fiercest battles were fought; their objective was to
expel liberals from their denominations. When liberal preacher Harry
Emerson Fosdick, one of the most influential clergymen of the time,
pleaded for tolerance in a sermon at the Baptist Convention of 1922, the
rancor of the response showed a visceral revulsion at such liberal ideas
and there seemed to be a landslide movement toward the fundamentalist
camp which spread to many denominations. By 1923, it looked like
fundamentalists would, indeed, rid denominations of the liberal danger.
But then a new campaign caught the country’s attention which would
eventually bring disrepute to the whole fundamentalist movement.
In 1920, Democratic politician and Presbyterian, William Jennings
Bryant, launched a crusade against the teaching of evolution in schools
and colleges; in his view, it was Darwinism that had led to the
atrocities of World War I. Touring the country, he drew big crowds and
extensive media coverage, saying Darwin's theory was a prime example of
the disturbing tendency of some scientists to fly in the face of "common
sense." People wanting a plain-speaking religion were all too eager to
find some easily understandable reason to reject evolution, and Bryant
gave it to them.
Still, this might not have become the great torch to bear for the
fundamentalists had it not been for John Scopes, a young teacher in the
town of Dayton, TN, who confessed that he had violated that state’s law
by teaching Darwin's theory. When the new American Civil Liberties Union
sent in a team of lawyers, headed by Clarence Darrow, to defend the
teacher, and when William Jennings Bryant agreed to support the law, the
1925 trial ceased to be about 1st amendment civil liberties and became a
contest between science and God. Darrow argued brilliantly for the
freedom that science must have to express itself while Bryant insisted
that, in the absence of definite proof, people had a right to reject an
"unsupported hypothesis" like Darwinism because of its immoral effects.
Scopes was convicted and the ACLU paid his $100 fine, but Darrow and
modern science were the real victors. The press gleefully exposed Bryant
and his supporters as hopeless anachronisms, H. L. Mencken describing
fundamentalists as "gaping primates of the upland valleys, thick in the
mean streets behind the gas-works. They are everywhere learning is too
heavy a burden for mortal minds to carry, even the vague, pathetic
learning on tap in the little red schoolhouses."
The liberals and secularists won the battle, showing that their
adversaries were not to be taken seriously, and the liberals regained
control of the denominations. But the fundamentalists did not go away:
indeed, their views became more extreme: before the Scopes trial, few
fundamentalists believed in so-called "Creation Science" which argued
that Genesis was scientifically sound; after the trial, they closed
their minds even more, and Creationism—along with an unswerving biblical
literalism—became central to their mindset. They also drifted to the
right of the political spectrum: before the war, they had been willing
to work with liberals for social reform; now they refused to be
associated with those who had beaten them. And this will be an
underlying theme in our story: fundamentalism exists in a symbiotic
relationship with an aggressive liberalism and secularism; whenever they
feel under attack, they will invariably become more isolated and more
extreme.
Fundamentalist faith is rooted in fear, an anxiety that cannot be
assuaged by any rational argument; embarrassed and embittered, they
nursed a deep grudge against the mainstream culture. When people feel
marginalized, even excluded, by society, they turn to the spiritual. As
the fundamentalists were evolving their faith, other conservative
movements like the Pentecostals and Charismatics were creating their own
religiosity that, also, rejected the pure logos of scientific
rationalism. Where the fundamentalists were returning to what they
regarded as the true doctrinal base of Christianity, Pentecostals,
having no interest in dogma, were returning to an even more fundamental
level: the raw Spirit. While fundamentalists were trying to make their
Bible-based religions entirely reasonable and scientific (trying to make
their mythos be logos), Pentecostals and Charismatics went way beneath
creedal concepts; while fundamentalists stressed the Word and the
literal, Pentecostals bypassed speech to access primal spirituality.
What is interesting is that, in a time of economic depression and a
great fear of foreigners, Pentecostal and Charismatic services saw
blacks and whites, middle-class and poor, embracing each other and
praying together, swept up in the deep human yearning for ecstasy and
transcendence as a way to overcome their sense of cultural isolation.
True to their exclusivity, the fundamentalists hated the Pentecostals,
but they both were trying to fill the void left by the victory of Reason
in the modern Western world.
By the end of World War II, only pre-millenialists (those who believed
that the Rapture would come before Christ's return) still called
themselves "fundamentalists." Other very-conservative Christians, like
Billy Graham, then, or Jerry Falwell, now, believed that they had to
create the Kingdom before Jesus could return, and called themselves
"evangelicals;" they believed their duty to save souls required
cooperation with other Christians, but fundamentalists stayed separate
from evangelicals.
Today, our culture is overwhelmingly oriented to the future: we tend to
see Truth as factual, historical and empirical; for Western
civilization, logos remains primary. But that still leaves a void at the
heart of modern culture and large numbers of people still want to be
religious, are still searching for meaning and purpose, still trying to
evolve new forms of faith. Like our own religion, Fundamentalism is one
of these modern religious experiments, but it has lost sight of some of
the most sacred values of traditional faiths.
They have turned the mythos of their religion into logos by insisting
that their dogmas are scientifically true: by insisting this, they have
made a mockery of both religion and science. As a result, they have
neglected the more tolerant, inclusive and compassionate teachings of
mainstream Christianity and have cultivated theologies of rage,
resentment and revenge. But fundamentalist fury reminds us that our
modern culture imposes extremely difficult demands on human beings ...
on being human.
For 50 years after the Scopes trial, until the late-1970s,
fundamentalists seemed to lie dormant; but then, with a vengeance, they
returned. Next week I’ll look at some familiar events and you might be
surprised as to why they occurred and who was actually behind them. And
I’ll also look at what, if anything, we liberal religionists can do
about all this: is there any possibility of peaceful coexistence between
us and the fundamentalists?
(Don’t you just love it when a sermon ends with a question?)
CLOSING WORDS:
(from the Rev. John Murray, a founder of Universalism, around 1790)
Go out into the highways and the by-ways. Give the people something of
your new vision. You may possess a small light, but uncover it, let it
shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the
hearts and minds of men and women. Give them not hell but hope and
courage; preach the kindness and everlasting love of (your) God.
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