The Fundamentalist Agenda
is absolutely natural, ancient, and powerful—but
the liberal impulse makes us humane.
By Davidson Loehr
The most famous definition of fundamentalism is H. L. Mencken's:
a terrible, pervasive fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun. There's
something to this. Fundamentalism is too fearful, too restrictive, too
lacking in faith to provide a home for the human spirit to soar or for
human societies to blossom.
But there are far more fundamental things to understand about fundamentalism,
especially in this age of terrorism. An adequate understanding also includes
some inescapable and uncomfortable critiques of America's cultural liberalism
of the last four decades. The attacks on September 11, 2001, provided
us a rare revelation about fundamentalism that arrived in two installments.
First, we became vividly aware of the things some Muslim fundamentalists
hate about our culture:
- They hate liberated women and all that symbolizes them. They hate
it when women compete with men in the workplace, when they decide when
or whether they will bear children, when they show the independence
of getting abortions. They hate changes in laws that previously gave
men more power over women.
- They hate the wide range of sexual orientations
and lifestyles that have always characterized human societies. They
hate homosexuality.
- They hate individual freedoms that allow people
to stray from the rigid sort of truth they want to constrain all
people. They hate individual rights that let others slough off their
simple certainties.
Not much was really new in this installment of the revelation.
We had seen all this before, when Khomeini's Muslim fundamentalists wreaked
such havoc in Iran starting in 1979. We have long known that Muslim
fundamentalism is a mortal enemy of freedom and democracy.
The surprise second installment came just a few days after 9 / 11 in
that remarkably unguarded interview on The 700 Club when the
Rev. Jerry Falwell told Pat Robertson, “I really believe that the pagans,
and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians
who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU,
People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize
America—I
point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'” These
men are so media-savvy it's amazing they would say such things on the
air. But it's also remarkable because in their list of “causes” of the
9 / 11 attacks, we heard almost exactly the same hate list:
- They hate liberated women who don't follow orders, who get abortions
when they want them, who threaten or laugh at some men's arrogant pretensions
to rule them.
- They hate the wide range of sexual orientations that
have always characterized human societies. They would force the country
to conform to a fantasy image of two married heterosexual parents where
the husband works and the wife stays home with the children—even when
that describes fewer than 25 percent of current American families.
- They hate individual freedoms that let people stray from the one
simple set of truths they want imposed on all in our country. Robertson
has been on record for a long time saying that democracy isn't a fit
form of government unless it is run by his kind of fundamentalist Christians.
Together, the two installments make vivid the fact that “our” Christian
fundamentalists have the same hate list as “their” Muslim fundamentalists.
From 1988 to 1993, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences sponsored
an interdisciplinary study known as The Fundamentalism Project, the largest
such study ever done. More than 100 scholars from all over the world
took part, reporting on every imaginable kind of fundamentalism. And
what they discovered was that the agenda of all fundamentalist movements
in the world is virtually identical, regardless of religion or culture.
They identified five characteristics shared by virtually all fundamentalisms.
The fundamentalists' agenda starts with insistence that their rules must
be made to apply to all people, and to all areas of life. There can be
no separation of church and state, or of public and private areas of
life. The rigid rules of God—and they never doubt that they and only
they have got these right—must become the law of the land. Pat Robertson,
again, has said that just as Supreme Court justices place a hand on the
Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution, so they should also place
a hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible. In Khomeini's
Iran, and in the recent Taliban rule of Afghanistan, we saw how brutal
and bloody this looks in real time.
The second agenda item is really at the top of the list, and it's vulgarly
simple: Men are on top. Men are bigger and stronger, and they rule not
only through physical strength but also and more importantly through
their influence on the laws and rules of the land. Men set the boundaries.
Men define the norms, and men enforce them. They also define women, and
they define them through narrowly conceived biological functions. Women
are to be supportive wives, mothers, and homemakers.
A third item follows from the others. (Indeed each part of the fundamentalist
agenda is necessarily interlocked, and needs every other part to survive.)
Since there is only one right picture of the world, one right set of
beliefs, and one right set of roles for men, women, and children, it
is imperative that this picture and these rules be communicated precisely
to the next generation. Therefore, fundamentalists must control education
by controlling textbooks and teaching styles, deciding what may and may
not be taught.
Fourth, fundamentalists spurn the modern, and want to return to a nostalgic
vision of a golden age that never really existed. Several of the scholars
observed a strong and deep resemblance between fundamentalism and fascism.
Both have almost identical agendas. Men are on top, women are subservient,
there is one rigid set of rules, with police and military might to enforce
them, and education is tightly controlled by the state. One scholar suggested
that it's helpful to understand fundamentalism as religious fascism,
and fascism as political fundamentalism. The phrase “overcoming the modern” is
a fascist slogan dating back to at least 1941.
The fifth point is the most abstract, though it's foundational. Fundamentalists
deny history in a radical and idiosyncratic way. Fundamentalists know
as well or better than anybody that culture shapes everything it touches:
The times we live in color how we think, what we value, and the kind
of people we become. Fundamentalists agree on the perverseness of modern
American society: the air of permissiveness and narcissism, individual
rights unbalanced by responsibilities, sex divorced from commitment,
and so on. What they don't want to see is the way culture colored the
era when their scriptures were created.
Good biblical scholarship begins by studying the cultural situation
when scriptures were written in search of their original intent, so that
we can better discern what messages they may still have that are relevant
for our lives. But if fundamentalists were to admit that their own scriptures
are as culturally conditioned as everything else, they would lose the
foundation of their certainties. Some scholars see evidence that St.
Paul, for instance, had severe personal hang-ups about sex that may account
for his harsh teachings about homosexuality and women. Many biblical
scholars treat some of Paul's teachings as rants rather than revelations.
But for fundamentalists, their scriptures fell straight from heaven in
a leather-bound book, every jot and tittle intact.
Except for the illustrations I've added in laying out the agenda that
the Fundamentalism Project discovered, you can't tell what religion,
culture, or century I'm describing. The scholars discovered this a dozen
years ago while they were presenting abstracts of their papers. Several
noted that all their papers were sounding alike, reporting on “species” when
studying the “genus” was called for, that there were strong family resemblances
between all fundamentalisms, even when the religions had had no contact,
no way to influence each other.
The only way all fundamentalisms can have the same agenda is if the
agenda preceded all the religions. And it did. Fundamentalist behaviors
are familiar because we've all seen them so many times. These men are
acting the role of “alpha males” who define the boundaries of their group's
territory and the norms and behaviors that define members of their in-group.
These are the behaviors of territorial species in which males are stronger
than females. In biological terms, these are the characteristic behaviors
of sexually dimorphous territorial animals. Males set and enforce the
rules, females obey the males and raise the children; there is a clear
separation between the in-group and the out-group. The in-group is protected;
outsiders are expelled or fought.
It is easier to account for this set of behavioral biases as part of
the common evolutionary heritage of our species than to argue that it
is simply a monumental coincidence that the social and behavioral agendas
of all fundamentalisms and fascisms are essentially identical.
What conservatives are conserving is the biological default setting
of our species, which has strong family resemblances to the default setting
of thousands of other species. This means that when fundamentalists say
they are obeying the word of God, they have severely understated the
authority for their position. The real authority behind this behavioral
scheme is millions of years older than all the religions and all the
gods there have ever been. It is the picture of life that gave birth
to most of the gods as its projected champions.
Fundamentalism is absolutely natural, ancient, powerful—and inadequate.
It's a means of structuring relationships that evolved when we lived
in troops of 150 or less. But in the modern world, it's completely incapable
of the nuance or flexibility needed to structure humane societies.
Fundamentalism's
conservative impulse wants stability in societies. Liberal impulses serve
to give us not stability but civility: humanity. They do this by expanding
the definitions of our inherited territorial categories. The essential
job of liberals in human societies is to enlarge our understanding of
who belongs in our in-group. This is the plot of virtually all liberal
advances.
Giving women the vote eighty years ago expanded the in-group from
only adult males to include adult females. Once that larger definition
was established by liberals, conservatives began defending that new
definition of the in-group rather than the smaller one. Likewise, the
civil rights movement was a way of saying that our in-group was also
multi-colored. Every liberal advance adds to the list of those who
belong within our society's protected group.
While society is a kind of slow dance between the conservative and
liberal impulses, the liberal role is the more important one. It makes
our societies humane rather than just stable and mean.
But for the liberal impulse to lead, liberals must remain in contact
with the center of our territorial instinct and our need for a structure
of responsibilities. Fundamentalist uprisings are a sign that the liberals
have failed to provide an adequate and balanced vision, that they have
not found a vision that attracts enough people to become stable.
Just as it's no coincidence that all fundamentalisms have similar
agendas, it's also no coincidence that the most successful liberal
advances tend to wrap their expanded definitions in what sound like
conservative categories.
John F. Kennedy's most famous line sounds like the terrifying dictate
of the world's most arrogant fascist: “Ask not what your country can
do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Imagine that line
coming from Hitler, Khomeini, Mullah Omar, or Jerry Falwell. It is
a conservative, even a fascist, slogan. Yet Kennedy used it to effect
significant liberal transformations in our society. Under that umbrella
he created the Peace Corps and vista programs and through them enlisted
many young people to extend our hand to those we had not before seen
as belonging to our in-group.
Likewise, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used the rhetoric of
a conservative vision to promote his liberal redefinition of the members
of our in-group. When he defined all Americans as the children of God,
those words could sound like the battle-cry of an American Taliban
on the verge of putting a Bible in every school, a catechism in every
legislature. Instead, King used that cry to include Americans of all
colors in the sacred and protected group of “all God's children”—which
was just what many white Southerners were arguing against forty years
ago.
When liberal visions work, it's because they have kept one foot solidly
in our deep territorial impulses with the other foot free to push the
margin, to expand the definition of those who belong in “our” territory.
When liberal visions fail, it is often because they fail to achieve
just this kind of balance between our conservative impulses and our
liberal needs.
Over the past half century, many of our liberal visions have been
too narrow, too self-absorbed, too unbalanced. This imbalance has been
a key factor in triggering recent fundamentalist uprisings. When liberals
don't lead well, others don't follow. And when society doesn't follow
liberal visions, liberals haven't led.
When liberals burned the U.S. flag during the Vietnam War rather than
waving it and insisting that America live up to its great tradition,
they lost the most powerful territorial symbol in our culture and with
it the ability to speak for our national interests. They created another
moral imbalance by defining abortion in amoral terms, as simply a matter
of individual rights—where only the mother, but not the developing
baby, was an “individual.” And they did the same whenever they emphasized
individual rights while neglecting the need to balance rights with
individual responsibilities toward the larger society.
Fundamentalist
uprisings are happen ing in some Muslim societies that hate the influence
our culture is having on their own. But the uprising is happening within
our own culture, too.
In Texas, where I live, the state has refused to grant the Ethical
Society in Austin a church tax exemption because its members don't
believe in God. The state maintains that defining God as a concept
won't do, that to qualify as a church the society's members must believe
in God as a being. The case has been through two appeals, and the state's
attorneys have now taken it to the Texas Supreme Court. If the state
wins, the ruling will affect every Unitarian Universalist church in
the state—not to mention Buddhists, Taoists, and Hindus. Austin has
the largest Hindu temple in North America, and Hindus are quite clear
that Brahman is in no sense a being, and that all his personified images—as
Krishna, Vishnu, Shiva, or the Divine Mother Durga and her manifestations—are
all imaginative creations, not beings.
In cases like these the fundamentalists are reacting absolutely instinctively—whether
they think they have instincts or not—to a threat to social stability
made up of the narrow and unbalanced liberal teachings of the past
three or four decades.
Maintaining both stability and civility, humane content and enduring
form, in human societies is an unending dance between the conservative
and the liberal impulses in human nature. The fundamentalist role in
this dance is quite easy: All you have to do is cling tightly to a
few simplistic teachings too small to do justice to the complex demands
of the real world. You just have to cling to these, and then pretend
that what you have done is honest and noble.
But the task of liberals is much, much harder. To be a liberal, to be
an awake, responsive, and responsible liberal—that can take, and that
can make, a whole life.
The
Rev. Dr. Davidson Loehr
is minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin,
Texas, and a Fellow in the Jesus Seminar. He holds degrees in theology, the philosophy
of religion, and the philosophy of science. He considers himself a religious
liberal but not a Unitarian Universalist.
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