The Fundamentalist Agenda

3 February 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

SERMON

The most famous definition of fundamentalism is probably still H.L. Mencken’s from over seventy years ago, when he defined it as “The terrible, pervasive fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun.” There’s something to this. It’s too fearful, too restrictive, too lacking in faith to provide a home for the human spirit to soar or for human societies to blossom.

But there isn’t enough to it. There are far more fundamental things to understand about the phenomenon of fundamentalism, especially since September 11th. Also, an adequate understanding of fundamentalism has some inescapable and uncomfortable critiques of America’s cultural liberalism of the past four decades. We were given the rare chance of a revelation in the aftermath of those attacks. That revelation came in two stages.

First was list of things some Muslim fundamentalists hate about our culture:

– They hate liberated women, and all that symbolizes them. They hate it when women compete with men in the workplace, when they decide when or whether they will become breeders, when they show the independence of getting abortions, and changing laws that previously gave men more power over them.

– They hate the wide range of sexual orientations and lifestyles that have always characterized human societies. They hate homosexuality, can’t confront the homosexual tendencies that exist in them, so project them outward and punish them in others.

– They hate individual freedoms that allow people to stray from the single rigid sort of truth they want to constrain all people. They hate individual rights that let others slough off their simple certainties.

Not much about these revelations was really new. We saw all this before, when Khomeini’s Muslim fundamentalists wreaked such havoc in Iran in the years following 1979. We have long known that Muslim fundamentalism is a mortal enemy of freedom and democracy.

But the surprise came just a few days after September 11th, in that remarkably unguarded interview on “The 700 Club” between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. It was remarkable partly because these men are so media-savvy it’s amazing they would say such things on the air. But it’s also remarkable because as they listed the “causes” of the September 11th attacks, we heard exactly the same hate list the Afghan Taliban had outlined:

– They hate liberated women who don’t follow orders, who get abortions when they want them, who threaten, or laugh at, their arrogant pretensions to rule them.

– They hate the wide range of sexual orientations that have always characterized human societies. They would force the country to conform to a fantasy image of two married heterosexual parents where the husband works and the wife stays home with the children – even when that describes fewer than one-sixth of current American families.

– They hate individual freedoms that let people stray from the one simple set of truths they want imposed on all in our country. Pat Robertson has been on record for a long time saying that democracy isn’t a fit form of government unless it is run by fundamentalist Christians of his kind.

It is terribly important for us to realize that the fact that “our” Christian fundamentalists have the same hate list as ‘their” Muslim fundamentalists is not a coincidence!

From 1988-1993, the University of Chicago conducted a six-year study known as The Fundamentalism Project, the largest such study ever done. About 150 scholars from all over the world took part, reporting on every imaginable kind of fundamentalism. And what they discovered was that the agenda of all fundamentalist movements in the world is virtually identical, regardless of religion or culture.

They identified five points shared by virtually all fundamentalisms:

1. Their rules must be made to apply to all people, and to all areas of life. There can be no separation of church and state, or of public and private areas of life. The rigid rules of God – and they never doubt that they and only they have got these right – must become the law of the land. Pat Robertson, again, has said that just as Supreme Court justices place a hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution, so they should also place a hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible. In Khomeini’s Iran of two decades ago, and in the recent Taliban rule of Afghanistan, we saw how brutal and bloody this looks in real time.

2. The second agenda item is really at the top of the list, and it’s vulgarly simple: Men are on top. In every way. Men are bigger and stronger, and they rule not only through physical strength, but also and more importantly through their influence on the laws and rules of the land. Men set the boundaries. Men define the norms, and men enforce them. They also define women, and they define them through narrowly-conceived biological functions. Women are to be supportive wives, mothers, and home-makers.

3. A third item follows from the others – indeed all of these agenda items are necessarily interlocked, and need each other to survive. Since there is only one right picture of the world, one right set of beliefs, and one right set of roles for men, women and children, it is imperative that this picture and these norms and rules be communicated precisely to the next generation. Therefore, they must control the education of the society. They control the textbooks, the teaching styles, they decide what may and may not be taught. In Afghanistan, women were denied any education at all beyond basic literacy – and sometimes not even that much. And in our own country it was a long and hard battle to get women access to college and professional educations and credentials.

4. A fourth point isn’t an agenda item, but an observation voiced by several of the scholars: there is an amazingly strong and deep resemblance between fundamentalism and fascism. Both have almost identical agendas. Men are on top, women are subservient, there is one rigid set of rules, with police and military might to enforce them, and education is tightly controlled by the State. One scholar suggested that it’s helpful to understand fundamentalism as religious fascism, and fascism as political fundamentalism. Fundamentalists spurn the modern, and want to return to a nostalgic vision of a golden age that never really existed. Likewise, the phrase “overcoming the modern” is a fascist slogan dating back to at least 1941.

5. And the fifth point is the most abstract, though it’s foundational. Fundamentalists deny history in a radical and idiosyncratic way. Fundamentalists know, as well or better than anybody, that culture taints everything it touches. Our teachers, our times, color how we think, what we value, and the kind of people we become. If you have perverse teachers or books, you develop perverse people and societies. And they agree on the perversions of our current American society: the air of permissiveness, narcissism, individual rights unbalanced by responsibilities, sex divorced from commitment, and so on. The culture must be controlled because it colors everything in it. So far, so good.

What they don’t want to see is that exactly the same thing was true when their own sacred scriptures were created. Good biblical scholarship begins by studying the cultural situation when scriptures were created, to understand their original intent so we can better discern what messages they may still have that are relevant for our lives. But if fundamentalists admit that their own scriptures are as culturally conditioned as everything else, they lose the foundation of their certainties.

St. Paul had severe personal hangups about sex, for instance, that lie behind his personal problems with homosexuality and women. How else would he say that it is a shameful thing for a woman to speak in church, or that men are made in the image of God, but women are made in the image of men? These are the reasons that informed biblical scholars take some of Paul’s teachings as rantings rather than revelations. But for fundamentalists, their scriptures fell straight from heaven in a leather-bound book, every jot and tittle intact.

Now something should be bothering you about this list. And that’s that except for the illustrations I”ve added, you can’t tell what religion, culture, or even century I’m talking about! This realization also stopped the scholars a dozen years ago while they were presenting abstracts of their papers at the fall meetings in Chicago. Several of them noted that all their papers were sounding alike, that we were reporting on ‘s pecies” and needed to be studying the “genus,” that there were strong family resemblances between all these fundamentalisms, even when the religions had had no contact, no way to influence each other.

This is one of the most important things we need to learn about the agendas of all fundamentalisms in the world. They are all alike. And the only way that can be the case is if the agenda preceded all of the religions.

And it did. These behaviors are familiar because we”ve all heard and seen them many times. These men are acting the role of Alpha Males who define the boundaries of their group’s territory, and the norms and behaviors that define members of their in-group. These are the behaviors of tens of thousands of territorial species in which males are stronger than females. Or to put it into jargon, these are the characteristic behaviors of sexually dimorphous territorial animals. Males set and enforce the rules, females obey the males and raise the children, there is a clear separation between the in-group and the out-group. The in-group is protected, the outsiders are expelled or fought.

What the conservatives of human societies are conserving is the biological default setting of our species – virtually identical with the default setting of ten thousand other species. This means that when fundamentalists say they are obeying the word of God, they have severely understated the authority for their position. The real authority behind this behavioral scheme is tens of millions of years older than all the religions and all the gods there have ever been. It is the picture of life that gave birth to most of the gods, as its projected protectors.

It’s absolutely natural, ancient, powerful – and completely inadequate. It’s a means of structuring relationships that evolved when we lived in troops of 150 or less. But in the modern world, it’s completely incapable of the nuance or flexibility needed to structure human societies in humane ways. It’s absolutely natural and absolutely inadequate.

But it does help us better understand the relative roles of conservatives and liberals in modern society, and the role that liberals play in giving birth to fundamentalist uprisings.

The conservative impulse that has its starkest form in the fundamentalist agenda is our attempt to give stability to our societies. And as many observers have noted, hierarchical structures tend to be very stable.

The liberal impulses serve to give us not stability but civility: humanity. And they do this by expanding the definitions of our inherited territorial categories. The fundamental job of liberals in human societies is to enlarge our understanding of who belongs in our in-group. This is the plot of virtually all liberal advances in society.

Giving women the vote eighty years ago was expanding the in-group from only adult males to include adult females. Once that larger definition was established by liberals, our conservatives began defending that definition of the in-group rather than the smaller one.

Likewise, the civil rights movement was a way of saying that our in-group was multi-colored as well as including both sexes. Every liberal advance adds to the list of those who belong within our society’s protected group.

This means that, while society is a kind of slow dance between the conservative and liberal impulses, the liberal role is the more important one. It provides civility and humanity, it makes our societies humane rather than just stable and mean.

It also means that in order for the liberal impulse to lead, liberals must remain in contact with the moral center of our territorial nature and our need for a structure of responsibilities. Fundamentalist uprisings are an early warning system telling us that the liberals have failed to provide an adequate and balanced vision, that they have not found a vision that attracts enough people to become stable.

Just as it’s no coincidence that all fundamentalisms have similar agendas, it’s also no coincidence that the most successful liberal advances tend to be made by wrapping their expanded definitions in what sound like extremely conservative categories. Take just a couple:

John F. Kennedy’s most famous line sounds like the terrifying dictate of the world’s worst fascism: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask rather what you can do for your country.” Imagine that line coming from Hitler, Khomeini, the Taliban, or Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell! It is a conservative, even a fascist, slogan. Yet Kennedy used it to effect significant liberal transformations in our society. Under that umbrella he created the Peace Corps and Vista, and enlisted many young people to extend our hand to those we had not before seen as belonging to our in-group: Liberal ends achieved through what sounded like conservative means.

Likewise, Martin Luther King used the rhetoric of a conservative vision, expanded through his liberal redefinition of the members of our in-group. When he defined all Americans as the children of God, those words could sound like the battle-cry of an American Taliban on the verge of putting a bible in every school, a catechism in every legislature. Instead, King used that cry to include Americans of all colors in the sacred and protected group of “all God’s children” – which was just what many Southerners were arguing against forty years ago. Liberal ends, conservative means.

When liberal visions work, it’s because they have kept one foot solidly in the moral center of our deep territorial impulses, and the other free to push the envelope, to create a bigger tent, to expand the definition of those who belong in “our” territory.

And when liberal visions fail, it is often because they fail to achieve just this kind of balance between our conservative impulses and our liberal needs.

During the past half century, many of our liberal visions have been too narrow, too self-absorbed, too unbalanced. And their imbalance has been a key factor in triggering the fundamentalist uprisings of the past decades. When liberals don’t lead well, others don’t follow. And when society doesn’t follow liberal visions, liberals haven’t led well (or at all).

– When liberals burned the American flag during the Vietnam War rather than waving it and insisting that America live up to its great tradition, they lost the most powerful territorial symbol in our culture, and lost the ability to speak for our national interests. This created an imbalance that planted the seeds of future fundamentalist uprisings.

– When liberals defined abortion in amoral terms, as simply a matter of individual rights – where only the mother, but not the developing baby, were “individuals” – they created a moral imbalance that planted the seeds of future fundamentalist uprisings (as well as quietly losing the support of many liberals, including liberal ministers).

– When liberals over-emphasized individual rights while ignoring the need to balance them with individual responsibilities toward the larger society, they planted the seeds of future fundamentalist uprisings.

Those uprisings are happening in some Muslim societies that hate us and hate the influence our culture is having on their own. They are also threatening within our own culture, as shown by that amazing interview on “The 700 Club” and some of both Robertson and Falwell’s statements of the past two decades. I have heard now that Jerry Falwell has filed suit in federal court to challenge Hamilton’s interpretation of the separation of church and state. I’m not sure how to check this, but if it’s true it is a sign that the Taliban’s power could be transported to our own shores. It would only take revoking the separation between church and state, and the use of state power to enforce church-dictated behaviors and norms for all. And the degradation of American education through the influence of fundamentalist lobbies on textbook publishers is already well-documented.

But if I’m right in what I’m suggesting here, it isn’t their fault. The fundamentalists are reacting absolutely instinctively – whether they think they have instincts or not – to a threat to social stability made up of the narrow and unbalanced liberal teachings of the past three or four decades.

Maintaining both stability and civility, humane content and enduring form in human societies, is an unending dance between the conservative and the liberal impulses within our societies. But the task of liberals is much, much harder.

It’s really quite easy to be a fundamentalist. All you have to do is cling tightly to a few simplistic teachings too small to do justice to the complex demands of the real world. You just have to cling to these, and then pretend that what you have done is either honest or noble.

But to be a liberal, really to be an awake, aware, responsive and responsible liberal – that can take, and that can make, a whole life.