The Family Research Council is launching a project aimed at convincing its supporters before the 2008 election that liberal politicians “are spouting God-talk” in order to “confuse people of faith” and hide their “true agenda.” Invoking the Religious Right’s recent favored phrase for its imagined constituency – as well as the “Swift Boat” campaign of 2004 – the so-called “Values Voters for Truth” campaign is an attempt to vilify liberals – and, obviously, Democratic candidates – as enemies of Christianity who are undertaking a conspiracy to “deceive and split values voters.”
From a recent fundraising letter from FRC Action:
Our relentless effort to reveal the facts about the Left’s true agenda is already under way. It will not stop until the last vote of the 2008 election has been cast. The Values Voters for Truth campaign will partner with organizations in all 50 states—and at the national level. We will mobilize values voters, engage them in the war of ideas, and keep them informed and involved.
We will rally churches to the cause. And by God’s grace, we will neutralize our opponents’ deceptive tactics.
As an example of this supposed “fraud,” the letter cites a Democratic presidential candidate who spoke of his “belief in Christ” and also supports civil unions for gay couples. Similarly, the letter warns that a candidate noting a “biblical call to feed the hungry” also voted against an anti-abortion bill. A third candidate is denounced for the “hypocrisy” of wanting to let gay couples adopt children. According to FRC, these supposed contradictions indicate that Democrats discussing their faith and values is merely “lip service,” part of a “campaign of deception” that led directly to the Democrats winning control of Congress in the 2006 elections.
I was recently invited by neil to visit his blog, an example of which is this charming piece in which the Rev. Chuck Currie is made fun of and called a heretic. In the course of the piece, neil says something about the UCC not being in favor of "sound doctrine", a phrase that means absolutely nothing to me.
Both of these pieces, one on the political front, the other on the religious front, highlight why I much prefer a liberal, pluralist approach to my faith. Indeed, I honestly don't understand fundamentalism. Even though ER and others have tried to tell me it was their reality at one time, a reality from which they are trying to escape, it is just foreign to my own experience. Intellectually I understand such things as biblical inerrancy, the necessity of asserting certain truths as absolute, and the strict moral code that usually applies to others. As a matter of existential grasping, however, it is just beyond me. My experience of the faith has always been one of opening up to more experiences, more people, more ways of living life, more ways of helping others, more ways of judging oneself and withholding judgment from others.
The exclusivity of both the socio-political branch and theological branch of fundamentalism is also something that I can consider intellectually without understanding its appeal or its relevance. The idea that only certain groups have access to Christian truth, that there is only one way to live a Christian life, that non-Christian ways obviously are excluded from being correct - again, I just don't get it. Apparently billions of people around the world are not only damned, but not fully human because they do not participate in the truth of the Christian faith.
I understand the whole in-group/out-group thing; I understand the dimension of fear and the necessity for metaphysical grounding that so many people seem to think is necessary in life. I just don't think any or all these answers add up to the reasons for fundamentalism. There is a piece missing, and I need help understanding it. Reducing this movement to psychology and sociology just doesn't fill out what is going on here. I need help understanding how and why certain people can actually believe they have access to Truth that is denied to all others.
6 comments:
I just finished "The Jesus Machine." The Family Research Council has its ducks lined up,. That doesn't mean they're honest. But they are a political farce to be reckoned with.
I just check out thast link and the comments. I think I'm about done with those kinds of tar babies and briar patches.
Sigh. I couldn't resist. I left a comment on Neil's current post.
He has an interesting blog. It's very organized, with all sorts of categories and breakdowns and it means absolutely nothing to me. Like his comment here about "the perversions of postmodernism" - I honestly don't get it.
My experience of God is of openness, grace, peace, acceptance. All I hear and read from fundamentalists is restrictions, judgment, division, and exclusion. I can't square my own experience with what they tell me is the "true Christianity".
When I say "Christian pluralism", I am referring to the fact that we have two thousand years of history of people trying to make sense of the reality of Jesus' message and life. Mixed in with a whole lot of bunk are some gems that seem to transcend the limitations of those who wrote and spoke. St. John Chrysostom, whose honorific means "golden tongued" because of his spellbinding preaching ability, is the true originator of Christian anti-Semitism. A narrow-minded bigot in many regards, he nonetheless has some of the most beautiful imagery and passages. One of my favorites, in a sermon on Romans, pictures the grace embodied in Jesus with Jesus as a beggar on the side of the road, the kind who won't let us alone, and who, when revealed, shows us that it is we who should have been begging.
Bernard of Clairvaux preached the first Crusade, instilling a bloodlust across Europe that resulted in a mass pogrom of Jews (which Bernard sought to end by giving sanctuary to Jews in his cathedral and urging the Pope to excommunicate any who participated in the killing of Jews). He also has some of the most beautiful passages of mystical writing; I think only St. John of the Cross's poetry surpasses Bernard's for its depth and vision.
These are just two of the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us, flawed to be sure, who have nonetheless struggled to make sense to the world of that which they themselves recognized was nonsensical. For all the flaws of all these and everyone, most definitely including myself, who try to figure it all out, I just can't believe there is one body of teaching that is True. It seems to me the Holy Spirit wouldn't work that way. Besides that, our language is such that any statement is provisional, subject to change, contingent, fleeting, like our lives. Whatever honest reflection of the reality of grace they may contain is itself a gift of grace, not anything substantive in the words themselves.
I fear the gems of John C. and Bernard of C. are just so much papist heresy to people like Neil. I'm not sure there's a way to make sense of a belief system like his (I peeked at his blog also - a bit too arrogant for my taste).
Perhaps looking the way of theology and philosophy is the wrong viewpoint for understanding fundamentalism. You have an "experience of God" that probably reflects your own early life and your family environment, so you attribute positive attributes to God. If you spent your formative years in a restrictive, denying and emotionally empty environment you might have a wildly different conception of God.
Thats a vast oversimplification I realize, but I'm only trying to suggest a different avenue of exploration.
Fear is the basis for all forms of fundamentalism, IMHO. Plain fear of the unknown, which causes people to cling to whatever handful of certainties they think they have in their grasp. The irony is that a Christian axiom is "perfect love casts out fear" and that Christian liberty and other really beneficial concepts are left on the shelf of ideas in favor of assertions of "fact" that actually are matters of faith. Sigh. Another oversimplification.
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