Fundamentalists batten down the hatches, focus on fixities.

By Ian Harris in Articles

In this article, first published in the Faith and Reason column of the ODT, Ian Harris explores the mindsets of Christian fundamentalism

IT is only natural for people to look for security and stability in their society's customs, institutions and religion. For some it is so important that they resist all attempts at change. That is regrettable, because in a period of major transition, such as the globalising world is currently experiencing, flexibility and openness offer more security than does battening down the hatches. The test is whether the new understandings and new ways of doing things enhance or cramp human life.

Fundamentalism in its many forms - economic, religious, political, scientific - digs in to defend the truth as laid down by those who claim the authority to define it. It is at once a mindset, a belief system and a mode of action. It is focused on fixities, and brooks no challenge.

For those who hanker after certainty in religion, this finality is reassuring. They are spared the discomfort of doubt, questioning, or seeing things from another perspective. But it is no way to make the most of life in the 21st century.

The year 1910 marked a milestone in the modern attempt to nail Christianity down once and for all. Some Presbyterians at Princeton Theological Seminary in the United States, alarmed by liberalising trends in the churches, drew up a list of five interpretations of Christianity (or dogmas) they said were fundamental to the faith:
-The Bible is inspired and infallible.
-Jesus was born of a virgin, and was divine.
-He bore on the cross the penalty for human sin.
-He rose physically from the dead.
-His miracles really happened.

Later another fundamental was considered more fundamental than the last of these, and it was replaced by the belief that Christ will literally return to earth.

With any new movement it helps to have a millionaire on board, and fundamentalism found two. Between 1910 and 1915 two Californian oil barons funded the publication of 12 pamphlets aimed at winning over church leaders in the battle against the liberals. More than three million of these pamphlets, called The Fundamentals, were printed for dispatch to every minister, Sunday school superintendent, theological professor and theological student in the English-speaking world.

Fundamentalists' conviction that the end of the world must be nigh was strengthened by "signs of the times" such as the slaughter of World War 1, the Balfour Declaration favouring a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the Russian Revolution, and the establishment of the League of Nations (damned as a revival of the Roman empire led by Antichrist). To liberal Christians these interpretations are bizarre, but they colour the attitudes of many conservative Protestants, especially in the United States, to this day.

In the 1920s American fundamentalists carried the battle into the public arena by demanding that states prohibit schools from teaching Darwin's theory of evolution, because it contradicted Scripture. This culminated in the famous "monkey trial" in 1925, when Tennessee teacher John Scopes was convicted of teaching Darwinism regardless. On the central issue of freedom of scientific inquiry versus biblical literalism, however, the fundamentalists were routed. They responded by looking for ways to give some kind of scientific credibility to the Bible's creation stories.

Fundamentalism often seems like a throwback to an earlier world, but its recourse to science in the attempt to disprove Darwinism is modern. So is the building of a counterculture by establishing Bible institutes, schools and universities, magazines and broadcasting empires distinct from the major churches.

Fundamentalists hailed the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, which they saw as heralding Christ's return and bringing closer the end of the world. By the 1960s they had identified the enemy in their midst as "secular humanism", which one of them defined as "anti-God, anti-moral, anti-self-restraint and anti-American". The last of these is significant.

In the 1980s they felt confident enough to mobilise politically. This was the era of Baptist Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, which campaigned against abortion, feminism, homosexual rights, communism, central government, pornography and gun control, and in support of family values, a strong military, Ronald Reagan and (again) America.

Financial and sexual scandals besmirched some prominent televangelists and punctured the movement's effectiveness, but it remains a potent force. In New Zealand, the movement's main impact over the past 40 years has been to make the major churches more conservative. And that has helped strip Christianity of any appeal it might otherwise have had for many questioning, liberal-minded people who want to cultivate a spiritual outlook that has integrity in our secular world.

--This article was originally published in the Faith and Reason column of the Otago Daily Times, Oct. 9, 2009.