Religious Nuts, Political Fanatics

The recent news of another act of senseless violence in America has raised questions of the nature of political and religious debate in our culture. When six people are killed, others are seriously wounded, and it all happens in a grocery store parking lot in Tuscon, Arizon, the horror and senselessness of such acts force us to ask, “Why?” “What’s the point?” “How could this happen?”

After the 911 attacks, the same questions were asked. One answer most people came to quickly was: Radical, Fundamentalist Muslims. Not just Muslims, but radical, fundamentalist Muslims. The fact is that Islam has a bloody history. Its sacred texts seem to offer support for “Holy Wars” and violence in the service of a militant religion (of course, it depends on how texts are interpreted and by what hermeneutical approach). But, the same could be said of other religions, even Christianity. G.K. Chesterton famously remarked, “The only good argument against Christianity is Christians.” When those who call themselves Christians fail to live up to that name, the unbeliever and doubter believe it proof against the claims of Christ. Chesteron’s point is that Christianity will be judged by its adherents, even if they are not truly devoted to Christ and His way. Dallas Willard, along a similar line, says:

… let Christian spiritual formation come to its fullness, and exclusiveness will take care of itself. If the witch and the warlock, the Buddhist and the Muslim, can truly walk in a holiness and power equal to that of Jesus Christ and his devoted followers, there is nothing more to say. But Christ himself, and not Christianity as a form of human culture, is the standard by which ‘we’ as well as ‘they’ are to be measured. (The Great Omission, 79)

The Irish Rock Band U2 released their Album All That You Can’t Leave Behind in 2000. One track was titled “New York.” The song is a descriptive tribute to the City. The band’s singer, Bono, changed several of the lyrics ad lib during a performance following the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. One of the lines of the song originally went like this:

Religious nuts, political fanatics, in the stew
Happily, not like me and you.

After 911, Bono changed it to this:

But religious nuts and political fanatics don’t belong.
New York’s singing a new song.

May we who name the name of Christ join in the singing. The discord of fundamentalism only leads to “aggressive certitude.” That’s the conclusion of Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld, in their book In Praise of Doubt: How to have convictions without becoming a fanatic (2009). Berger and Zijderveld identify three characteristics of fundamentalism:

• Fundamentalism is a reactive phenomenon
• Fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon
• Fundamentalism is an attempt to restore the taken-for-grantedness of a tradition, typically understood as a return to a (real or imagined) pristine past of the tradition.

Fundamentalism is not a timeless feature of a religious faith, political ideology, or other tradition. It is reactionary. Berger and Zijderveld explain, “The reaction is always against a perceived threat to a community that embodies certain values (religious or secular).” Fundamentalism is modern, since “It can only be understood against the background of modernizing and relativizing process.” Again, Berger and Zijderveld explain that despite fundamentalism’s claim to be conservative, harkening back to some golden age of a given tradition, “Fundamentalism is very different from traditionalism.”

The difference can be simply put: Traditionalism means that the tradition is taken for granted; fundamentalism arises when the taken-for-grantedness has been challenged or lost outright. (Berger & Zijderveld, 72).

These authors give us the best illustration of fundamentalism I’ve ever heard, alluding to a nineteenth century visit from Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie to England. They attended the opera with Queen Victoria.

Eugenie, the guest, went into the royal box first. She gracefully acknowledged the applause of the public, gracefully looked behind her to her chair, and then gracefully sat down on it. Victoria was no less graceful in her demeanor, but with one interesting difference: She didn’t look behind her—she knew that the chair would be there. A person truly rooted in a tradition takes the ‘chair’ for granted and can sit on it without reflection. A fundamentalist, on the other hand, no longer assumes that the ‘chair’ will be there; he or she must insist on its being there, and this presupposes both reflection and decision. It follows that a traditionalist can afford to be relaxed about his or her worldview and quite tolerant toward those who don’t share it—after all, they’re poor slobs who deny the obvious. For the fundamentalist, these others are a serious threat to hard-won certainty; they must be converted, or segregated, or in the extreme case expelled or ‘liquidated.’ (Berger & Zijderveld, 72).

The third and final characteristic of fundamentalism explains the need for the “aggressiveness” and “defensiveness” of the fundamentalist. He or she can never regain the pristine past of the tradition. The whole project is “inherently fragile.” “It must continuously be defended, propped up” (Berger & Zijderveld, 73).

The Restoration Movement must avoid the fundamentalist trap! We can easily forget the great principles of the Restoration Ideal (Unity on the Bible alone for the global spread of the gospel). There is a tendency to reductive theology, where we focus on a few items of worship, or other church practices. In place of the high principles of the Restoration Movement and the core gospel, we may insist on uniformity on certain worship practices, certainty on secondary matters of the faith, and divisiveness that smacks of “aggressive certitude.” We may never use a gun, or a bomb, but we may use words and actions that tear others down and tear apart Christ’s church.

Jaroslav Pelikan reminds us, in an interview in U.S. News & World Report (July 26, 1989), he said:

Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.

Jesus reminds us:

And by this, you invalidated the word of God for the sake of your tradition (Matthew 15:6, NASB).