Flight from Fundamentalism

A fan letter to Andrew Sullivan about his book, The Conservative Soul, reminds me of what it felt like going to a fundamentalist college and my journey out of what felt like a prison to me, too.

I, a 55 year old raised Catholic, turned Christian woman had my world rocked by your book. I had been wondering for some time about my political whereabouts. I thought I was a Republican and was comfortable with it. I thought I was a Christian and felt somewhat comfortable with it. Then George Bush came along with his faith, which I thought was a good thing at first, until I began to see the party as hypocritical, or as I call them Pharasitical. After experiencing a Bible Study that I increasingly felt uncomfortable with I decided to stop attending.

Unknowingly then, I had put myself in a fundamentalist prison. Subject by subject you helped shake me out of that box. But now what to do with what I had lived and what I have just learned. I savored each page and slowly unpeeled myself from the fundamentalist box I was in.

A thought came to my mind about the administration's fundamentalists’ thoughts on homosexuality. If Jesus were to come upon a homosexual in the streets I believe from the scriptures that He would embrace him as He did us all. If the scriptures reflect Jesus’ loving attitude, then how can the fundamentalists judge and treat them they way they do? Don’t they realize they are grieving the Father?

The beautiful message I got from your book was align myself with the work Jesus did for us and continues to do through us if we let Him. And we can’t let Him if we are judging others.

I like your chapters on life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. So much that I am now reading the essays from Thomas Jefferson. You opened my eyes to several philosophers that I would like to read more on. The message I got there was: enjoy God in your life and don’t push God on others - just live it.

Fundamental Mistakes

Andrew Sullivan quoted Peter Berger from a Pew Forum discussion on Fundamentalism and Relativism. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life is a branch of the Pew Charitable Trusts in his blog. The text of the full discussion is here.

Relativism is a concept reviled by the Religious Right. They don't want to look at other cultures or religions as having anything of worth or value. Mr. Berger argues that Relativism and Fundamentalism are two sides of the same coin.

It is a stretch in my opinion, as neither shares a common methodology. One sees all points of view as equally valid. The other sees all opposing points of view as equally invalid. Neither values consensus unless it corresponds to their own rigid view of how things ought to be. There the similarities end.

What is interesting is that Mr. Berger has an interesting insight into religious and political fundamentalism.

Under modern conditions, where almost everyone lives in communities in which diversity has taken the place of consensus, certainty is much more difficult to come by.

Relativism can be described as a world view that not only acknowledges but celebrates the absence of consensus. So-called post-modernist theorists like to speak of narratives and, in principle, every narrative is as valued as any other. The moral end result of this world view can be captured by imagining a television interview with a cannibal. “You believe that people should be cooked and eaten. I certainly don’t want to be judgmental, but the audience will be interested. Tell us more.” (Laughter.) This is not all that fictitious.

Fundamentalists respond to the same situation of certainty-scarcity by seeking to regain absolute certainty about every aspect of their world view. No doubt is permitted. Whoever disagrees is an enemy to be converted, shunned or, in the extreme case, removed.

(Emphasis added.)

Is the desire to have certainty in an uncertain world what drives religious fundamentalists in their world view? Be they Christian, Muslim or Atheist, fundamentalism seems to breed fanaticism. There is only one correct view and it is theirs, as they see it.

They resort to the religion, throwing out the deity for the safety of absolute rules and punishment. In throwing out the deity along with the meaning of the religion, they fall victim to tyranny.

Although they purport to have faith, they don't know the meaning of the concept in practice. Faith requires accepting the inevitable uncertainty of life, which is a premise that fundamentalists are not willing to take. To practice faith, one has to give up trying to be God and accept that we can't fathom everything. Reason only takes us so far then we must trust God.

In the quest for certainty in life the fundamentalists' theology becomes general. They adopt a perverted form of relativism to form coalitions. Groups with whom they disagree theologically become friends in a common cause. It is no longer a god that they worship, but "moral certainty" or "Judeo-Christian principles".

In the vein of the Religious Right, they seek to return the nation to their brand of moral certainty. All others are damned anyway, so why should they enjoy the benefits of human compassion?

It becomes easy to stereotype a group who don't fit the pattern. Those with moral certainty suddenly find it quite easy to scapegoat the other group for all the uncertainty in life that their moral compasses cannot guide them through.

It is that fanaticism of rules and punishment that drives them to their own inevitable conclusion - they sacrifice the very morals that they purport to be supreme in order to quell those who disagree.

I recall reading at the start of the Information Age that at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution people who were displaced by the economic changes fled toward the safety of religion. It was believed that Christ would come any day and they sought refuge in religious certainty. Perhaps that is what happened at the end of the 20th Century as economic changes in the developed nations changed for the worse for most people.

When Islamic fundamentalists committed terrorist acts, it drove people further toward religious and political certainty. They craved certainty in an uncertain world. Unfortunately, religious certainty without a god or politics without compassion leads to the same unsatisfactory end. We end up with the same problems that we sought to flee.

Perhaps that is why death is such an unknown. No matter how much we fool ourselves into believing something is absolute, in the end, we face the unknown, even within the context of our religious beliefs.

If there is no atheist in a foxhole, there is a fathomless pit of uncertainty at the end of life. That is when faith becomes important. Not blind faith, but faith that you don't know what comes next and that such uncertainty is acceptable. Faith in practice is an acceptance that we are not God. Once we stop trying to be God, we become content.

It is sad that the fundamentalists of this world can't see the uncertainty in the world around them and come to terms with the fact that we can't know everything. Unfortunately, rules are guidelines that can't anticipate every circumstance. We have to find a way to live with one another as imperfect beings.

Moral certainty is as dead a god as one can get. Surely it should be called moral cowardice instead.

All Apologies

I've enjoyed reading Andrew Sullivan through the years. He was an old-school conservative who didn't embrace the neocon ideology. I don't always agree with his conclusions, but I always enjoy his thoughtful reasoning.

Unlike other conservative writers, he posted an essay today on his blog fessing up to his own inadequacies concerning the Iraq War. What I Got Wrong About Iraq. He wrote it for Slate, the online magazine.
He writes that he committed four cardinal sins: Historical Narcissism, Narrow Moralism, Unconservatism, and Misreading Bush.

Historical Narcissism: Listening to criticism from the Left, he says that he filtered it through his Reaganite/Thatcherite historical filter and focused on the ideological arguments to the detriment of clear analysis of the true situation.

"I allowed myself to be distracted by an ideological battle when what was required was clear-eyed prudence."

Narrow Moralism: Having weighed the pros and cons of the Iraq War before it began, he felt that no matter what happened, it couldn't be wrong to remove an evil dictator from power.

"I became enamored of my own morality and this single moral act. And he was a monster, as we discovered. But what I failed to grasp is that war is also a monster, and that unless one weighs all the possibly evil consequences of an abstractly moral act, one hasn't really engaged in anything much but self-righteousness."

Unconservatism: Knowing the historical problems that the British had in running Iraq and of the Sunni-Shiite division, he dismissed history and his own conservative ideology. He bought the Administration story that Iraq was more secular and modern than most Middle Eastern countries.

"I greatly under-estimated them - and as someone who liked to think of myself as a conservative, I pathetically failed to appreciate how those divides never truly go away and certainly cannot be abolished by a Western magic wand. In that sense I was not conservative enough."

Misreading Bush: Although the Administration's execution of the war was fraught with incompetence, he believes war is often paired with incompetence. Instead, he feels it was misreading Bush's personal morality that was the most pertinent misread he made.

"I had no idea he was so complacent - even glib - about the evil that men with good intentions can enable. I truly did not believe that Bush would use 9/11 to tear up the Geneva Conventions. When I first heard of abuses at Gitmo, I dismissed them as enemy propaganda. I certainly never believed that a conservative would embrace torture as the central thrust of an anti-terror strategy, and lie about it, and scapegoat underlings for it...

"I certainly never believed that a war I supported for the sake of freedom would actually use as its central weapon the deepest antithesis of freedom - the destruction of human autonomy and dignity and will that is torture.

"To distort this by shredding the English language, by engaging in newspeak that I had long associated with totalitarian regimes, was a further insult. And for me, [it was] an epiphany about what American conservatism had come to mean."


I had a different experience from Mr. Sullivan in the early days of the war.

I remember a business dinner just after the war began, where someone asked me what I thought about the situation.

I thought about it and said, "As an American Indian, the Administration's rationale sounds uncomfortably like Manifest Destiny."

I was uncomfortable with the ideological rationale being forced down the country's throat at the expense of rational analysis. Inherent in the idea of Manifest Destiny was the superiority of Christianity and Western political philosophy as compared to the perceived inferiority of American Indians, their religions and governments.

The American people by and large, were convinced of their superiority due to their Christianity and sought to stamp out what they felt were inferior peoples with inferior religions. Indians were denied religious freedom despite the U.S. protection of religion in its constitution.

We were being asked to trust the Administration without asking bothersome questions. No where in history can I recall a situation where people were told to blindly trust their leaders when it when it turned out well.

As Sullivan points out, the Administration's use of totalitarian tactics and rhetoric were very troubling to me, as well. Of course, totalitarian tactics were closely tied to the implementation of Manifest Destiny. People tend to skim over those moral issues where Indians are concerned. But we remember.

Had Sullivan recalled the worst of American military and civil atrocities against Indians, he might have been more troubled by the Administration earlier.

The failure of the President was due to his fundamentalist religious views. He feels that the end justifies the means in Iraq because he sees himself as a Christian and Iraq's religion and culture as inferior.

In his mind, God has sent American to save the Iraqi people. He just substituted "democracy" for "Christianity". It is the same hubris that was used to execute Manifest Destiny.

Bush failed to grasp the importance of the religious divides in Iraq because from the start, he didn't think Islam is a religion on par with his own. It was unimportant to him and to his administration's analysis.

It is the same religious certitude that goes with any fundamentalist religion, be it Christian, Jewish, Muslim or even atheism. Once convinced of divine right, otherwise good people will engage in no end of atrocities to further their ideology at the expense of their humanity.

It is ironic that fundamentalist religious zealots on both sides of the war have diminished both countries. It is an irony I'd prefer to do without, but here we are.