Religious Right Watch

Is Christian Fundamentalism Anti-Intellectual?

from The League: Reassembled

Is Christian fundamentalism anti-intellectual?  It is easy to respond with an enthusiastic "Yes!" because fundamentalists tend to disagree with many of the concepts brought to us by modernism, a hallmark characteristic of the Religious Right.

In addition, one of the most frustrating tactics employed by fundamentalist Christians in discussions of religion and theology is the "Faith Card." Some topics are simply "a matter of faith," meaning not up for discussion. The Faith Card is often pulled when the subject turns to the existence of God or Biblical inerrancy.

Many atheists see the Faith Card as evidence that fundamentalism is anti-intellectual. Refusing to subject a belief to rational arguments indicates a preference for holding onto the belief over thinking about that belief. This practice is undoubtedly anti-intellectual.

This does not mean, however, that fundamentalism itself is anti-intellectual. In Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, George Marsden examined the rationalism that serves as an essential component of Christian fundamentalism:

[The fundamentalist] heritage includes a cultural vision of all things, including learning, brought into the service of the sovereign God. Fundamentalists accordingly retain vestiges of this ideal. Schools, including colleges and 'universities,' are central parts of their exmpires. Although they may only rarely attain excellence in learning, they seek it in principle and sometimes do attain it. No group is more eager to brandish honorary degrees. Perhaps more to the point, genuine degrees are more than welcome when in service of the Lord. ...

Even more centrally, fundamentalists are among those contemporary Americans who take ideas seriously. ...For the fundamentalist, what one believes is of the utmost importance. ... [The League reminds you that a complete stranger on the street is more likely to drag you into an argument about the Saving Grace of Jesus than Friedrich Schleiermacher's theory of antithesis.]

Fundamentalist thought often appears anti-intellectual because of its proneness to oversimplification. The universe is divided in two - the moral and the immoral, the forces of light and darkness. This polarized thinking reflects a crass popularizing that indeed is subversive to serious intellectual inquiry. The fundamentalist worldview starts with the premise that the world is divided between the forces of God and of Satan and sorts out evidence to fit that paradigm. Nevertheless, fundamentalist thinking also reflects a modern intellectual tradition that dates largely from the Enlightenment. Fundamentalist though had close links with the Baconian and Common Sense assumptions of the early modern era. Humans are capable of positive knowledge based on sure foundations. If rationally classified, such knowledge can yield a great deal of certainty. Combined with biblicism, such a view of knowledge leads to supreme confidence on religious questions. Despite the conspicuous subjectivism throughout evangelicalism and within fundamentalism itself, one side of the fundamentalist mentality is committed to inductive rationalism. ...

So an oversimplified view? Yes.
Dead wrong? Of course.
But anti-intellectual? Nope.

Orientalism and the Religious Right

Christianity came of age in what the Roman scholar Keith Hopkins calls, "A world full of gods"--the era of Rome's history, not terribly long after the republic became an empire, marked by the rise of:
1. mystical religiousity and
2. megalomaniacal monarchs. As Rome warred hard and played hard, said mystical religiosity became only more prevalent, politically relevant, and distracting, and the state become only more deified in the person of the emperor, corrupt, and militarized.

Does this perhaps sound strangely familiar?

Arguably, in the Religious Right's support of the imperial presidency can be heard echoes of Rome's fall, and perhaps omens of our American adventure's end, too.

This rise in the irrational and the abandonment of any pretense of republicanism among Rome's populace satiated by violent entertainment and gross consumption (the Romans bought and bought, and produced shockingly little; most of their luxury items and many staples came from conquered lands) was often characterized by scholars of Antiquity as a result of the influence of "Orientalism" on the Roman Empire.

First, let me point out that the term Orientalism suggests slightly different things in different academic disciplines. Also, it is considered politically incorrect. I stress that I use it here ironically. The way Western Civilization as a college or high school course was taught for generations in American classrooms was that the "Oriental" influence on Rome was a bad thing. And since America traced its style of civic spirit and government to the Roman republic, such "Orientalism" was seen as also un-American.

By that standard, adherents to nationalistic Christianity today in the US are behaving in an absolutely un-American, an "Oriental" fashion: advancing religiosity within the republic and backing the concept of a strong, sole national leader. One can see this in the Religious Right's injection into the nation's consciousness and political discourse and activity everything from Intelligent Design to praying, Bible studies, or the laying on of hands or anointing with oil in The White House and federal chambers.

When scholars of ancient Rome used to refer to "Orientalism," they didn't mean influences from China or India or Japan, but influences from what scholars today term the Near East, including but not limited to Persia (modern Iran), Egypt, and Asia Minor, (modern Turkey). The ancient foe of both the Greek republics and the Roman republic (and Empire) was Persia. It followed a monarchical model of government in which a royal person and his court had all the rights, and the masses--the populace--had few if any. This was the way things worked in Egypt, too, with its Pharaohs and later Ptolemaic and other rulers, and the many kings of the lands of Asia Minor.

And born of these same numerous lands, the outlaying regions of Roman geo-political influence and beyond, were the mystery cults, of which Christianity (or more correctly "early Christianities," for there were competing versions of the faith for some time), comprised only a representative sample. There was the cult of Mithras from Iran, the cults of Attis and Cybele from Asia Minor, the cult of Isis from Egypt, and the list goes on and on. They were referred to as mystery cults because they involved privileged mystical knowledge or tended to have elements of secrecy and symbolism in their rites--such say, say, the symbolic eating of the flesh of a god-man, or submersion in water.

Of course, it's a tongue-in-cheek accusation that the Religious Right is guilty of an "Orientalism" that is weakening America; but, is the nod-and-a-wink in the terminology or the argument itself?

I'll let you decide just how valid the argument is.

But let me ask: Could it be--could it possibly be--that our once Enlightenment-inspired, reason-loving, and disestablishment-based republic, increasingly imbued by popular conservative evangelical Christian culture, is eschewing the humanism, rationalism, and secularism enshrined in the Constitution that was embraced by our Founding Fathers, be they the Christians among them or the secular deists like Washington, Jefferson, and Adams?

Glossary update

While the situation isn't as bad as it used to be, too many progressives are poorly educated about terminology relating to the Religious Right.

I started the glossary project last summer, as part of this blog, Religious Right Watch, but recently updated the glossary to integrate recent material into the definitions.

I also have started to add organizations and people to the glossary, and I hope to turn the first batch of those into live entries soon. (They are just place holders right now.)

Similar projects have been done, I am sure, and are online. I discovered Wikipedia not long after beginning my glossary, and found that it covered many of the same terms that I had already written entries for or was planning to.

But context is important, and I decided to press ahead with a Religious Right Watch glossary precisely because it was going to be about only the Religious Right, and exist on a website concerning the Religious Right.

I hope you will peruse the glossary and find it informative.

- Scott Isebrand

Federal court reinstates challenge to Bush's faith-based initiative

From the AP article:

"A three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday reinstated the lawsuit brought by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The group claims Bush's program, which helps religious organizations get government funding to provide social services, violates the separation of church and state."

Why the religious right loves the imperial presidency

The legal proposal known as the "unitary executive" is much in the news. President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, Samuel Alito, argued for it in November 2000 at a panel sponsored by the rightwing Federalist Society. The proposal, as Walter Shapiro summarized it in Salon.com, argues that "every part of the executive branch (including regulatory agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and, yes, independent counsels like Kenneth Starr) should be legally under the control of the president."

The media too seldom notes the synergy between the religious right's current desire for codified Christianization of the United States and the concept of the unitary executive. That synergy is very important; it is a threat to liberty and a reason why both the unitary executive concept in general and Samuel Alito's nomination in particular should be opposed by progressives and anyone concerned about the power and influence of the religious right on the republic and American culture.

The basic idea of a super-powerful or all-powerful president (akin to the concept of an "imperial presidency") is not new. Some early Americans thought the presidency should be an office held for life; some supporters of George Washington wanted to make him our king. Looking more aptly to modern comparisons, we see Franklin D. Roosevelt (a Democrat) and Richard Nixon (a Republican) both embodied relatively super-strong presidencies. Roosevelt attempted to radically alter the nature of the Supreme Court without a Constitutional amendment. Richard Nixon sought the power to declare war (which--though the casual observer would never know it--is a power wisely reserved for Congress) and the power of full immunity from legislative oversight. Motivated largely by personal vindictiveness, Nixon acted illegally on his beliefs about the executive branch's would-be special privileges. Fortunately, the media had active investigative reporters back then who exposed Nixon; also fortunately, Congress was not controlled by Nixon's own political party, and the cumulative result of those two realities was that Nixon's abuses caused his downfall.

That was then.

Today, many of Nixon's more powerful admirers, like Vice-President Dick Cheney and Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld agree with Nixon and want to craft an imperial presidency.

They have succeeded hugely. (See here, here, here, and here; also, a broader overview wisely including President Clinton's administration is here; also, Cheney's love of the imperial presidencyrecently caught the attention of The New York Times.)

What makes the imperial nature of the Bush presidency especially dangerous is that it comes at the same time when much of the religious right believes, probably correctly, that a tipping point has been reached in their struggle to formally Christianize America in brazen defiance of our Founding Fathers' enlightenment ideals and in opposition to our Founders' dreams of what America might be at its best.

The religious right is basically a marriage of socially and theologically conservative Christians (including fundamentalists, conservative evangelicals, and others) with the Republican Party (including neo-conservatives within it, represented by Donald Rumsfeld among many others). When Republican candidates win, the religious right wins.

And now, the religious right sees that the Republican Party controls the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and the Presidency. (Consider also that the culture of the Republican-controlled executive itself is expressly conservative Christian: after all, Bible studies occur in the Bush White House, Bush consults "rapture Christian" shamans on foreign policy, and Bush adheres strongly and openly to his version of Christianity.)

What is more, the media has also been variously tamed or purchased by the conservative Republican movement in America. (See Michael Massing's "The End of News?" and "The Press: The Enemy Within.")

It might be said that the Supreme Court is the only serious player among great socio-political estates that remains to fall to pro-Christianization conservative movement in the U.S.

Enter Samuel Alito, and enter the great hope for a living "unitary executive," which under this president could be used to steamroll ahead the religious right's beloved Christianization agenda, and would almost certainly also embolden George W. Bush in his own public religiosity (Won't Alito's confirmation be evidence of Jesus' divine endorsement of all Bush stands for?), thereby foisting onto The United States of America its first Commander-in-Chief and de facto Pontifex Maximus.

So, for the religious right, what isn't there to like now about the concept of supreme executive power? Yes, FDR made the presidency even more powerful, but he exhibited merely a genteel Episcopalian sort of Christianity; what is more, he wasn't a conservative; he backed progressive ideas from racial integration of the military to Social Security, Medicare, and the FDIC. Nixon was a conservative, but he also seemed not very religious. (His language made at least one evangelical literally cringe when he and I considered together a transcript of an unedited Oval Office recording. And you thought sailors could swear?)

But today is very different: it's the era of near Republican hegemony and a pop evangelical president born of a multi-millionaire Big Oil dynasty and born-again of a multi-million person Big Jesus nationalistic piety. This era is a great threat to the health of America, including to the hope that our children might come of age in a truly informed, democratic republic committed to defending and expanding liberty, justice, and human rights for all.

So, what are some of the things we can do to counter this trend?

More on that in a future post.

New lawsuit alleges violations by faith-based groups

From The Chicago Tribune article:

Faith-based groups are barred from proselytizing or engaging in other obvious religious activity when using federal funds to encourage teenagers to abstain from premarital sex or help substance abusers fight addictions. Some groups may have run afoul of that federal prohibition.

Lawsuits by the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation accuse the faith-based organizations and the government of violating the constitutional separation of church and state. Meanwhile, experts say the Bush administration is doing too little to monitor religious groups receiving federal money.

Critics cite the Silver Ring Thing program that preaches sexual abstinence to teens. It is known for pulsing, high-tech, multimedia shows at which teenagers can buy silver rings to symbolize their pledge to avoid sex until marriage.

A hopefully unusually egregious example of your tax dollars being used illegally:

After he pleaded guilty to marijuana possession . . . 23-year-old Flint construction worker [Joseph Hanas was given a choice by] a county drug court judge in Michigan: agree to live for a year at Inner City Christian Outreach, a faith-based residential facility, or be sent to jail. Hanas chose Inner City, which is run by a Pentecostal church. At Inner City, staffers told Hanas that his Roman Catholic faith was "witchcraft" and prevented his priest from visiting him or giving him his rosary beads, Hanas said.

And instead of substance-abuse treatment, Hanas said he was forced to read the Bible several hours each day, attend five hours of church on Sundays and was told the only way he would successfully complete the program was to convert to the Pentecostal church.

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