By now it should be obvious from this blog and two others of mine,
Beyond Darwin and
Old-Style Liberal Blog, that I'm a religious liberal, and, politically, I'm a center-left moderate: an "old-style liberal" who thinks a lot of the doctrine of the secular left today — e.g. arrant multiculturalism, knee-jerk political correctness, unlimited support for abortion rights — is wrong.
In other words, I have a worldview which, though it evolves over time, keeps me at odds with both leftists and rightists. Even so, what I seek most of all is a sense of solidarity with the rest of the world, taken in toto. Yes, indeed, I admit it ... it's a contradiction! Being at odds with those I disagree with is a strange way to promote solidarity.
At any rate ... in the religious sphere, I'd say, the leftists are the atheists, the agnostics, and to a certain extent the apathetic ones who simply wish religion would fade into the background. The rightists are the fundamentalists, many evangelicals, many religious conservatives, the creationists. (I'm speaking of these categories in Christian terms, though of course similar categories exist in other religions.)
In politics and secular ideology, the leftists and rightists are not as easy to label, except with reference to their positions on specific topics. We no longer can speak of leftists as communists, socialists, or fellow travelers, to be sure, and there are so many versions of political conservatism, so-called "neo-conservatism" being just one of them.
A simple rule, then, is this: in secular ideology, a leftist or "liberal" is anyone whom a self-styled "conservative" excoriates. And a rightist or "conservative" is anyone whom a self-styled "progressive" (the L-word now being a dirty one) excoriates.
Perhaps uncoincidentally, there seems to be a strong correlation between where one is on the religious spectrum and where one is on the political/ideological spectrum. There aren't a whole lot of atheists on the political right, nor do many religious conservatives flock to the political left.
The way I see it, there seems to be, in both the religious sphere and the secular one, a dynamic in which the leftists and rightists who manifestly abhor one another still manage through their respective shows of assertiveness and counterassertiveness to keep the other side in business. They feed off each other. They alienate the middle.
If I had my druthers, I'd like both wings to go away, in both religious and secular versions, leaving people in the middle to debate whether to be center-left or center-right.
But the wing the I find most offensive is, I admit, the religious-conservative one. In particular, it is "the face of evangelical Christianity," which Timothy K. Beal, in
Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith, says he has "come to distrust" (p. 68).
Beal, raised as a conservative evangelical in (I believe) the Southern Baptist tradition, is now alienated from his childhood faith. As a professor of religion at a major university — and a religious liberal — he still wrestles with what he does and does not believe. This was why he took himself and his family on an extended road trip to visit places like Holy Land USA and Golgotha Fun Park, travel destinations that appeal mostly to that face of American religion that he is now skeptical of. He wants to understand their appeal, even if he can't fully get with the program anymore.
Evangelical Christianity, he says, "always inclines itself toward theological fundamentalism. It's the face that is turned on by the dream of an ideological system that is total, lock-tight, free of all logical contradiction. In this sort of theological answer machine, there is no room for doubts, uncertainties, questions" (p. 68). Beal finds that unwillingness to entertain doubts and tensions frankly repellent. So do I.
Another way to put it is that I like a big tent. I'd like to get us all into the same huge tent, in fact, where we can carry on our remaining conversations and debates with civility.
I'm a Catholic by choice and conversion, though I was raised by a mother who was a lapsed Southern Baptist and a father who was a lapsed Methodist. I spent my youth unchurched, at best only a token believer in God. In midlife I found that I was a believing Christian after all, and so I found my way to the style of Episcopalian faith termed Anglo-Catholicism ... which is akin to what Anglicans in the Church of England call the "high church."
Next, the Anglo-Catholic emphasis on elaborate liturgies and sacraments as signs of divine grace made it just a hop, skip, and jump for me to shift to
Roman Catholicism, when certain aspects of Episcopalianism began to grate. It certainly helped, also, that I had many Catholic friends, and that I had been (and still am) quite enthusiastic about the Jesuit education I received as a youth at Georgetown University.
Clearly, the Catholic Church aims (with how much success is a matter of debate) to be a big tent; the word "catholic" means "universal."
The Church of England and its around-the-world projection, the Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church in this country is a part, is another would-be big-tent faith. It houses "high church" people who call themselves Catholics — though not
Roman Catholics — and "low church" people who pride themselves on their Protestantism, as well as "broad church" folks who (I gather) are somewhere in between.
If I may gloss rather improbably over the tension that has existed historically between Roman Catholics and Anglicans — thanks to you, Henry VIII — I must say I think of these two flavors of Christian belief as being much more truly "conservative" than anything we tend to speak of as "conservative" today.
Which means, roughly speaking, that their general outlook (though one is Protestant and the other Catholic)
precedes the fundamentalism that in the early 20th century grew out of an adverse reaction to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, first appearing some decades prior to the
fin de siècle but becoming scientific orthodoxy only at about that time.
Protestant fundamentalism is historically separatist in outlook, according to a recent Peter J. Boyer article in
The New Yorker: "The Big Tent: Billy Graham, Franklin Graham, and the transformation of American evangelicalism" (not available online?) in the August 22, 2005, issue.
"The Fundamentals," says Boyer, was "an influential series of books ... published between 1910 and 1915 [that] laid out the case for Christian orthodoxy." It strongly opposed the "modernist" theology that held that, in view of Darwinian evolution, "the divine will of God could be seen in the progress of man on earth [inasmuch as] mankind was essentially good and wholly perfectible, and would eventually progress to the achievement of God's kingdom on earth."
That liberal, progressive, modernist outlook tended to look upon the founder of the Christian faith as the "historical Jesus." The Bible was said to be the work of men, not God. That update to traditional theology was found patently offensive by such Protestant luminaries as J. Gresham Machen, who "argued that a theology that denied Christ's divinity and doubted the Bible wasn't Christianity at all but, rather, a distinct and separate religion."
Thus was born a tendency to separatism which splintered American Evangelical Protestantism until the advent of Billy Graham in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The slightest deviation from fundamentalist orthodoxy was met with tar and feathers. Billy Graham changed all that over the course of many decades, as he promoted a unique sort of big-tent salvation, but now the torch has been passed to his son Franklin, who shows signs of reinstating the old orthodoxy:
... Franklin [writes Boyer] is quite willing to voice what he deems harsh truths. Just that morning, he had told me that the United Nations will fail, because it is a godless enterprise. Abortion is murder, he said, and homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God. After the attacks of September 11th, Franklin declared that as a relgion Islam was "wicked, violent, and not of the same God" — an assertion from which he has hardly retreated.
How sad, say I. It is exactly the opposite of what Jesus preached, when he railed against the Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, and all the other "parties" which splintered the Jewish people in his day, making it virtually certain, Jesus prophesied, that Rome would crush the life out of Israel and destroy the Jerusalem Temple, if Jews did not repent of their internal separatism and come together in faith.
The history books show Jesus was right. Israel did not heal its internal wounds, and the Temple in Jerusalem was lost only a few decades after the crucifixion.
How's that for the "historical Jesus"?
Today, in America, the ideological heirs of the Jewish "parties" of Jesus's day are — in the
name of Jesus! — sowing the same kind of calumny as did the Pharisees and Sadducees. Take the subject of abortion. If abortion is "murder," then how does the woman who has one different from the adulteress who appears in John, chapter 8:
The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."
Stoning to death was, of course, a ritual form of execution performed by Jewish scribes or "teachers of the law" in Jesus's day.
No, I don't think most abortions are moral ... but there's no need to call them "murder" and thereby tar-and-feather (or, metaphorically, stone to death, since being cast out of community is effectively a spiritual death sentence) anyone who has one.
Nor is there any constructive value in calling the U.N. "godless." Nor in saying homosexuality is "a sin in the eyes of God" — presumably, even if it's just an orientation and not an actual practice.
It all leads me to ask the possibly unanswerable question, wherefore religious fundamentalism? Where does the conviction that God wants us to dissociate ourselves from those who don't believe as we do come from?
I am put in mind of something that happened to me when I was 13. Though I had spent precious little time in church until then, I was spending the summer with relatives who were regular attendees at the local Southern Baptist church. My cousin Susan took me to Sunday School one time, where as a guest I was given first crack at the question of the day: Now that you are getting old enough to go out on dates, should you have dates with members of other faiths?
I said, "Yes, since it's a good way to learn about other kinds of people."
Wrong!
The teacher asked the others in the class to set me straight: No dates with Methodists or Presbyterians, much less Catholics or Jews, because what would happen if you fell in love and wanted to get married?
That was when I decided at a tender age that I didn't want to have anything to do with religion!
If religion drives people apart, I knew almost instinctively, then what good is it? We need to be brought together more, not driven further apart.
But fundamentalists, obviously, disagree ... as do a lot of evangelicals, even post-Billy Graham.
In fact, I would posit a rule: the more a religious system of thought is "total, lock-tight, free of all logical contradiction" (in Timothy Beal's words above), the more fundamentalist it is, and the more it promotes splintering and separatism ... which is exactly the
opposite of the true Christian message.
Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution is my continuing object of fascination (see Theology of the Body, Part 5: the Transformation of Lust and preceding posts for more).
