Features
Why we’re all fundamentalist
Mark Vernon
When did faith stop being about trust, and become a set
of
propositions to be believed? Mark Vernon looks
back in history for
clues to the fundamentals that fire a true life passion for
people.
There is a story about Socrates, in which the sage of Athens is
looking back on his life1. He recalls one day sitting with Plato,
in the days of his great disciple's youth. Plato is talking.
Socrates is watching him. He can see the freckles on Plato's face,
his intelligent eyes, his seriousness, his confidence. Suddenly,
Socrates is struck by a thought: 'I knew that if an archer were to
shoot at him, I would step in front of him without hesitating and
I'd take the arrow in my chest.' He knew this without a doubt. And
then came a feeling that surprised him. 'I was smiling because I
was truly happy.'
Human beings are all, in a sense, fundamentalists. Or at least,
we might all hope to be so - an individual who knows who they would
die for; what they would die for. It will be a person or belief so
essential, so sacred, that sacrificing for it would not so much end
your life as show your life has an end, in the sense of a goal, a
reason, a meaning.
Further, knowing what you would die for means that you know what
you live for. There is nothing that makes life more worth living;
it generates purpose, commitment, love. It is liberating too. If
you know you could let go of life, you can live more freely now.
Socrates smiled. He was happy.
Fundamentalism, though, is different. In its rarer, violent
forms it is a basic conviction about life too, though gone wrong.
Love reveals what you would die for. But the passions of hatred and
war can do so too, as the jihadis learnt in the Afghan conflicts of
the last decades of the 20th century. Further, this kind of
fundamentalism is not so much about what you would die for as what
you would kill for.
IN THE BEGINNING
The more common kind of fundamentalism is a reaction to anxiety
and dread. So it doesn't liberate, but compounds fears. It might be
a fear of science or reason, and the way they undermine supposed
certainties. It might be a reaction to humiliation, as is generally
reckoned to have been the case when the word 'fundamentalist' was
first coined. A list of fundamentals, or doctrinal tenets, had been
drawn up in the early part of the 20th century by a group of
individuals who were fearful for the future of evangelical faith.
Their fears were proven justified at the so-called Scopes Monkey
Trial of the 1920s. Creationism was pitted against Darwinism in a
court of law in the United States. The media coverage led to their
beliefs being widely mocked and derided. Christian fundamentalism
has hardly looked back.
So what is it that goes wrong?
The beginnings of an understanding might be found by asking why
it is that we humans finding meaning in life from knowing what we
would die for. The work of the anthropologist Scott Atran provides
one answer2. Arguing from a non-committed standpoint in terms of
belief, he deploys an evolutionary frame. Religion is interpreted
as a kind of ideological device that was necessary to overcome the
'selfish gene' problems associated with forming large, cohesive
groups. If our ancestors were to overcome their individual genetic
interests and live harmoniously in collectives like city-states and
civilisations, they had to buy into a notion of 'fictive kinship',
a story that they all belonged together. Belief in a deity helps
create this sense of togetherness like nothing else. Trust in such
a moral entity means that the individual willingly sublimates their
selfish interests to those of God, and hence the group. To go
against the group is now not to look after number one, it is to go
against God.
PROS AND CONS
There is an upside, as there is with any fundamental belief. Atran
argues that the idea of universal humanity is only possible when
there was, first, the idea of universal divinity. We are all made
in the image of God, as the Judaeo-Christian tradition has it.
According to his evolutionary story, monotheism is not the root of
all evil, but is the wellspring of much that is valuable.
But there is the downside too. Fictive kinship makes war an ever
present danger, for the reason that it fires our moral passions,
and nothing excites moral passions like conflict. Who's in? Who's
out? Who's threatening what's most dear to us, what's sacred? It
sells newspapers. It drives our leaders. In its violent
manifestations, war is not politics by others means, it is morality
by other means. The US bombs for the idea of freedom. The Muslim
radical fights for the purification of jihad.
The double downside is that such violent actions are irrational,
in the sense that they are hard to reason with. They are not at
base calculating but, instead, Atran's research shows that people
engage in violence because at least part of them feels they have no
choice. I cannot stand idle while my family, my community, my
country and our values are violated.
One ramification of this analysis is political. It implies that
trying to resolve violent conflicts by material means, such as
offering land swaps, commercial contracts or money in cash,
probably only exacerbates the hatred. It's a bit like being asked
whether you would sell your child for a million pounds, or two
million, or three? The more that is offered the more offended you
become, your child being sacred.
Moreover, when sacred values drive conflict they do so with
little regard to the prospect of success: a commitment to a cause
matters more than access to superior weaponry. Hence we now have
asymmetric warfare and conflicts that are bedding down over
generations.
NOBLE LIES?
I suspect it is possible to challenge the evolutionary story about
the value of a moral deity, and perhaps find some grounds for hope
amid this depressing analysis. In the literature it is known as a
'privileging of the absurd': beliefs like God, seen by the purely
rational as absurd, generate evolutionary advantages like fictive
kinship and so even if absurd, they stick. But there is an
alternative interpretation in which the emergence of sophisticated
religious systems are vehicles by which homo sapiens emerged from
the black and white world of kill-or-be-killed into the morally
complex world that characterizes a rich humanity. Sara Savage, the
Cambridge psychologist of religion, has argued that intellectual
subtlety, not noble lies, is what we should value religion for.
Multifaceted traditions that allow the faithful to hold more than
one fundamental in tension are resistant to being turned back into
black and white beliefs. (Conversely, fundamentalist terrorists
typically are found to have poor religious education, and so are
ill-equipped to rebut indoctrination.)
So a revised evolutionary story holds some insights. But what of
the more general, non-violent forms of fundamentalism? Cultural
analysis can help here and a fascinating study is provided by the
Jewish scholar, Haym Soloveitchick.
In
an essay entitled, 'Migration, Acculturation and the New Role of
Texts3, Soloveitchick tracks how the nature of faith has changed
over the last century or so among orthodox and ultra-orthodox Jews.
Before then, these communities had two broad traditions upon which
to draw. One was an intellectual engagement with their faith. It
wrestled with the texts of the Jewish law. The other was a mimetic
or imitative engagement. This was the core of their faith - the
source of what was fundamental - the practices, patterns and habits
of life that they learnt in the home, from their parents, and which
became as much a part of them as the air they breathed.
What has happened since is that the world has changed. Now,
extended families fragment. Geographical separation thins
communities. New partners, work colleagues and friends, not of the
faith, don't share the old way of life. The mimetic process is
disrupted. As a result, the intellectual tradition rushes in to
fill the void. The full weight of what it is to be Jewish has to be
born by this more legalistic, and probably conservative,
strand.
STRAINING OVER OLIVES
Soloveitchick highlights one vivid example of such a change,
concerning the amount of bread that should be consumed at
Passover.
'One is required by Jewish law to consume a certain minimal amount
(shiur) - a quantity here equal to the size of an olive. Jews have
been practicing the Passover seder for at least two thousand years,
and no one paid very much attention to what that minimal amount
was. One knew it automatically, for one had seen it eaten at one's
parents' table on innumerable Passover eves; one simply did as
one's parents had done. Around the year 1940, a famous Talmudist,
the Hason Ish, published an essay4 in which he vigorously
questioned whether scholars had not seriously underestimated the
size of an olive in talmudic times. He then insisted on a minimal
standard about twice the size of the commonly accepted one. Within
a decade his doctrine began to seep down into popular practice, and
by now has become almost de rigueur in haredi circles.'
The change might be generalised to other faiths. Believers,
feeling buffeted by increasing pluralism, adopt the new
performative ways of being faithful, those that place great store
on specifics. In Islam, huge importance may become attached to
wearing the veil; for Christians, it might be displaying a
crucifix. The religious scholar Scott Appleby makes a further
point. Faith stops feeling like a way of life that holds you, and
becomes a way of life you must hold onto. Not far on from that are
feelings about being at odds with the world, and then that the
world is at odds with you. The mind of the fundamentalist
darkens.
HOT-BUTTON ISSUES
A similar pattern is seen with tokens, those moral issues -
abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia - that are not about what you
do, but rather about what you believe. Such tokens represent deep
concerns about the way things are in the world, what the Pope calls
the 'culture of death' in relation to abortion, for example. At an
existential level, they become so inflated because objection to
them is also a way of saying 'You are not hearing me' or 'I fear
for my place in the world'. Question a token issue and nothing less
than life itself feels under threat.
Incidentally, it seems pretty clear that scientistic
conservatism has its own tokens too, in its loathing, as opposed to
cool critique, of beliefs like creationism. No doubt, there are
'liberalist' tokens as well - rendering human rights as absolutes,
perhaps.
I also wonder whether tokens are a way of staving off believers'
feelings about being compromised by worldliness because they are
implicated in it too. For example, it is often noted by pro-gay
campaigners that injunctions against usury are far more widespread
in the Bible, and yet fundamentalists never seem that bothered by
them: much more seems to hang on the relatively rare verses against
homosexuality. Here, the logic of the token issue of homosexuality
would allow the fundamentalist or conservative to contain any
sullied feelings they may have that arise from their own usurious
practices - their pension, mortgage and credit cards. Hence it
becomes part of reactionary rhetoric to blame all the ills of the
world on homosexuality, or some other token. Empirically, it is
clearly untenable. Symbolically, it is powerfully cathartic.
TWO WAYS TO BELIEVE
More positively, this analysis is an argument for having to learn
again how to be faithful in the modern world. That is, of course, a
huge, generational issue. But there are clues as to what will be
involved.
Consider what it means to say you believe something. We tend to
assume this means holding that x or y is true, in a propositional
sense. 'I believe in God' is shorthand for 'I believe that there
exists an omnipotent, omniscient, all-good deity, whom I can also
call Father'. However, this is a relatively new meaning for belief,
as Karen Armstrong points out in her book, The Case for
God5. The word 'belief' now means a declaration of what is
taken to be factually correct, whereas before it meant a
whole-hearted commitment to a person or tradition, as in 'I believe
in you'.
Asserting 'I believe in' rather than 'I believe that' emerges
from within a faithful practice, the propositions becoming
nonsensical aside from that. People presumably first said 'God is
good' because they had an experience of love that transcended pain
and death. But today, the temptation is to say 'God is good' out of
a need to define the attributes of a deity. Little wonder the
originally joyous statement becomes weighed down by, say, the
problem of evil.
EXPERIENCE OVER DOCTRINE
The recognition that doctrine is a useful and necessary but always
limited expression helps explain the significance of the widely
discussed Emergence Christianity. It appeals because it favours a
wisdom derived from experience. Hence Harvey Cox writes that the
future of faith lies with the age of the spirit6. When people say
'I believe in' they want to hear 'I trust', before, 'I know'.
It is, in fact, the old way. There is a need to rediscover what
Augustine meant when he examined the literal interpretation of
Genesis, as he did in a book of that title7. A fundamentalist
turning to Augustine today might be surprised at what they found:
he argues that God created the universe simultaneously, as if out
of a Big Bang, and not according to a seven-day works schedule. The
lost point is that, for Augustine, the literal meaning meant the
true meaning, and truth will typically be hard to discover. The
last thing 'literal' meant was the plain or obvious reading,
without interpretation or elaboration. That would be like reading
'love is blind' and assuming it meant a person called Love is in
danger of walking into lamp posts.
This is commensurate with the New Testament too, as I was
surprised to read in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological
Society, the organ of a group 'devoted to the inerrancy and
inspiration of the Scriptures'8. Entitled 'Some Doubts about
Doubt', the author David De Graaf charts what the New Testament has
to say about doubt. It turns out, nothing at all - at least in the
propositional sense meant mostly today, as in 'I doubt God exists'.
Instead, the Greek words typically translated as doubt mean 'being
of two minds' or 'disputing so as to cause division'. This makes a
huge difference to the way the texts are read.
For example, when in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus talks about
moving mountains if you do 'not doubt in your heart' (Mark 11:23),
it is tempting to read it as a kind of magic trick, as if it's
saying believe God exists, or that Jesus is Lord, and the earth
will move for you, literally. But the text really means you will
achieve extraordinary things if you set your heart on God. Or
consider the Epistle of James, the letter with one of the most
sustained riffs apparently against doubt, part of which reads 'you
must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a
wave of the sea'. (James 1:6) That sounds today like being able to
assert every sub-clause of the creed with full, literal confidence;
no questions. Except again it is really a comment on trusting in
God and allowing that passion to hold you to your deepest
commitments.
EMBRACING DOUBTS
The New Testament is much more concerned with how you live as a
Christian than what you believe as a Christian. Further, the irony
is that living as a Christian will involve doubts, uncertainties,
unknowing - actually, needs to. Think of what it's like to fall in
love with someone, or to write a book, or to devote your life to
the study of, say, the dark matter that cosmologists tell us fills
the universe. Doubts will be an everyday occurrence, and the
capacity to live with feeling unsure, crucial to your success.
Personal growth, creativity, discovery depends upon being able to
handle uncertainty. Faith, then, is close to doubt. The opposite of
faith is fundamentalism. But what is required is keeping faith -
faith too not being about confidently asserting truths but rather
developing the capacity to trust yourself, others, God. This is the
fundamental for human flourishing.
You might say that the reason fundamentalism goes wrong is
because what is truly fundamental gets misplaced. Love and trust
are traded for more secure stock: statements and tokens. The
performance of certain narrow facets of the faith, perhaps wearing
a veil or being against abortion, become the vital test of
soundness.
Fundamentalism is a constant risk because we need fundamentals
to live by, to make death meaningful. It needs continually guarding
against, not least because a modern mentality finds it so easy to
misunderstand the nature of faith. Herbert McCabe, the Dominican
theologian, put it like this, in his paper, 'Doubt is Not
Unbelief'9:
'Faith is a communal capability. Much like you need others to
speak a language, so you need others to live your faith. You do not
have faith primarily because you know what you believe, you have
faith because you are persuaded or moved: you trust. Faith seeks
understanding.'
THE LOVE TEST
The danger arises when expressions of faith stop being about the
love of God. They become about who's in or who's out, who's
threatening what's most dear to us or what's sacred. The trick is
to keep testing the doctrines, the propositions, the tokens, and to
keep critiquing what is being made of them. 'Are they degenerating
simply into an expression of loyalty?' McCabe asks. 'Are they
really still about God's love?'
And this is the rock bottom Christian fundamental, McCabe
explains, because Jesus of Nazareth shows his disciples what God's
love is like. Here is a man who knows what he will die for. Love.
And as to what Jesus might kill for? Nothing. He is no
fundamentalist. He sacrifices himself first. He will take the
arrow.
NOTES
1 Short story by Mike Katz, published in Philosophy
Now magazine, May/June 2009.
2 Atran, S, Talking To The Enemy: Violent extremism,
sacred values and what it means to be human, (2010, London:
Allen Lane).
3 Soloveitchick H, in Marty, M.E. & Appleby, R.S. (eds),
Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The dynamic character of
movements (1994, University of Chicago Press).
4 Cited by Soloveitchick, ibid.
5 Armstrong, K. The Case for God: What religion really
means, (2009, The Bodley Head) .
6 Cox, Harvey, The Future of Faith, (2009,
HarperOne).
7 Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram - usually
translated as The Literal Meaning of Genesis, though also as First
Meanings in Genesis.
8 Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
48/4 (December 2005), pp733-55.
9 Published in McCabe, H. Faith Within Reason,
(2007, Continuum).