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RELIGIOUS WRONG - Part ONE : The Fundamentalist Part of The THEOLOGY of the RIGHT [ where it got its RELIGIOUS Ideas ] |
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Everybody recognizes the powerful impact of Christian Fundamentalism on today's Religious Right and through it on the current leadership of the Republican Party. The following are large excerpts from a course on Religion in America, taught by Dr. Terry L. Matthews,
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Religion at Duke University, in 1995: America's Christian Fundamentalism" [ http://www.wfu.edu:/~matthetl/perspectives/twentyone.html ] Adherents to America's Christian fundamentalism are concentrated in the Bible-belt which encompasses what was once known as the lands below the Mason-Dixon line along with the border states. In other words, America's Bible-belt encompasses those areas where slavery was deeply entrenched in the years before the American Civil War and the surrounding areas. Many slave states seceded from the Union and engaged in a bloody civil war against their fellow Americans to maintain the institution of slavery. Let me repeat that last idea in a slightly different fashion: slave holders who dominated the governments of the slave states preferred to destroy the United States, to devastate the lives of millions of Americans, slave and non-slave, combatants and non-combatants, alike, and to kill, maim,and cripple their fellow Americans rather than to give up their institution of slavery. These same slave-owning men who attempted to dissolve the Union were considered by many of their contemporaries to be good, God-fearing men and leaders of the community. . . Slave owners and other profiteers from human misery did not want a religion that made them feel guilty about the source of their riches. So the rich, who were mostly rich because they owned slaves and profited from the misery of others, choose not to hire ministers and preachers who taught a message which made them feel guilty. The ministers who were hired were the ministers who preached the message which the rich were willing to hear - a message which justified the rights of the slave owner to manage his property the way he saw fit, a message which demanded obedience from the slaves, and a message which promoted the subjugation of women, Native Americans, and other peoples. As the institution of slavery spread, so did this new American religion. As the institution of slavery deepened, so did the church's insistence on the justice of the rich to the fruits of their slaves' labor. America's Christian fundamentalism, then, is descended from the religion of slave owners, slave traders, and slaves. Long before the American Civil War, an ostensibly Christian religion arose which completely neglected the hundreds of biblical injunctions for social justice. In place of a message of social justice, this new Christian religion demanded only one thing: from the elite, money; from the rest of society, obedience to the established order. To assist the church in supporting the established power, the church demanded two things from the faithful. First, the true believer must have an unquestioning faith in the religious teachings of their church, usually expressed as an unquestioning adherence to the Bible as most helpfully interpreted by that Christian church, even if that unquestioning faith required one to suspend his willingness to reason and his ability to accept reality and facts. Second, morality was solely defined as (women's) sexual fidelity, augmented at times with an injunction for men to support their wives and children, in return, of course, for their unconditional obedience. As always, the rich and powerful were exempt from both of these rules. Gone were the strictures against greed. Gone were the obligations of the elites to ameliorate the plight of the least fortunate among them. Gone were God's demands that humanity be wise stewards of God's creation. Gone were the biblical injunctions to bring justice into the world, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to tend to the sick, to assist the widow, to protect the orphan, and to shelter the homeless. Gone were the stories of God's wrath at Pharaoh for his refusal to let God's people go. Gone were the stories of God liberating the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. Gone were the stories of God's mercy and God's love for all of her creation. Using a theology of Social Darwinism in which it was claimed that the rich and powerful are rich and powerful as a sign of God's blessing, the rich and powerful were seen as virtuous and deserving the riches which were showered upon them by a just God. In reality, nineteenth-century slave owners and robber barons became rich because they were corrupt and ruthless. They had the money to silence their critics, as well as, to reward their flatterers. The defeat of southern troops in the Civil War was not enough to convince those who rebelled against both the Union and God that God did not smile on their theology. Rather, the system was updated to find legal and quasi-legal methods of subjugating the former slaves. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized the Black community. Black men and women, particularly those who became relatively successful, financially, or who became leaders in the Black community, were lynched with impunity. No white man in the former Confederacy was convicted ( by any jury of their "Christian peers") of raping a black woman for the next hundred years (or of any other serious crime against Black people). Well into the 1960s, white social activists working on behalf of people of color, as well as Black people, were murdered in the deep South. When northerners came south to work on behalf of people of color, doing simple things like registering them to vote, southerners, including those good God-fearing, Bible-believing Christians, virulently denounced the interlopers as "outside agitators." Yet, in the 1960s, . . . a series of laws were passed and new social programs were instituted which helped to bring women of all colors and people of color into the mainstream of American life. White men, especially rich, white men saw their privileges eroding and struck back, first against civil rights activists and feminists, then against the broader social justice / social responsibility movement. The rich and powerful found allies in only a few sections of the American people among racists, male chauvinists, the religiously intolerant, the xenophobic, and, of course, the Bible-belt Christians who had long been conditioned to respond to the influence of money, to ignore issues of social justice, and to define morality in terms of sexuality. Contrary to all of the teachings of their ostensible spiritual leader, Jesus of Nazareth, in their lust for temporal power, fundamentalist Christians allied themselves with the rich and powerful. In doing so, they forfeited every legitimate claim they ever possessed to moral authority." See how much of America's Conservative "Christianity" is derived from the Confederacy, otherwise known as "the Bible Belt". http://LiberalsLikeChrist.Org/christianconservatism.html. In the early years of the 20th century there was a re-awakening of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth known as "the SOCIAL GOSPEL" that called on the Christian Churches to identify, as Jesus did, with the poor instead of the rich. Although this movement met with considerable success for a time, it was not long before rich patrons sponsored the development of a replacement for the Social Gospel that would be friendly to the rich and the powerful in America. That substitute for true Christianity was to become known as "Fundamentalism". The term "fundamentalism" came into existence at the Niagara Falls Bible Conference which was convened in an effort to define those things that were fundamental to belief. The term was also used to describe "The Fundamentals," a collection of twelve books on five subjects published in 1910 by Milton and Lyman Steward. These two wealthy brothers were concerned with the [so-called] moral and spiritual decline they believed was infecting Protestantism, and sought to restore the historic faith with a 12 volume call to arms that dealt with five subjects that latter became known as the five fundamentals of the faith: (2) the virgin birth and deity of Christ; (3) the substitutionary view of the atonement; (4) the bodily resurrection of Christ; (5) The imminent return of Christ. It is often assumed that the Fundamentalist movement was Protestant, filled with unsophisticated rural country bumpkins, and appealed to the uneducated. But the reality, at least in the early years, was different. Belief in the fundamentals was not exclusively Protestant. A number of these beliefs were also held by Roman Catholics. In addition, the movement was primarily urban in its early form. The principle centers of strength for fundamentalism were Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Fort Worth, Denver, and Los Angeles. This movement was also closely associated with such prominent schools as Princeton Theological Seminary. In essence, three views of how the church might address itself to a changed world had developed in the post-Civil War America. The first was that of the Modernists "who sought to adjust the inherited faith to the new intellectual climate" (Hudson). The Second was that of the fundamentalists who rejected science, and embraced the world view of the Scriptures, insisting the old ways must be preserved unimpaired. The third view was that of Henry Ward Beecher and other Christocentric liberals who argued on behalf of the existence of two revelations from God - one in Scripture and one in the natural world - and argued these revelations are compatible with one another on some deeper level. Beecher pointed out that the church had produced the Bible, rather than the Bible producing the Church, and since it was a product of human beings, its understanding of reality might be contingent. Fundamentalists also differed with their peers on the issue of social reform. Where many modernists and Christocentric liberals were drawn to the social gospel, fundamentalism - heavily influenced by dispensationalism had their own scheme of social reform. Reform of the sort advocated by proponents of the Social Gospel was a waste of time. The world would soon end, and as a result, all the energies of the church should be focused on converting individuals, and getting them saved. . . But perhaps the one person who did the most to do in fundamentalism (during the early 20th century) was William Jennings Bryan, ( who had thrice been Democratic candidate for the presidency, after being a Congressman from Nebraska, and had served for a time as Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State, and ) who fancied himself as one of fundamentalism's greatest defenders. To challenge these laws a test case was planned, and John Scopes became the defendant in what came to be known as the "Monkey Trial." Clarence Darrow, a famous lawyer, volunteered to defend Scopes. The trial should have focused on the right of the public to insist on what and what not will be taught in the public schools. Instead, the debate came to be focused on whether the Bible was literally true, the position that William Jennings Bryan championed. As a result of Bryan's decision to debate the Bible instead of the public's right to decide curriculum, popular interest was as great in that day as it has been in the recent trial (of O. J. Simpson) in Los Angeles. . . Darrow and H.L. Menken, the most famous journalist of his day, helped to spread the image of the fundamentalists as hicks. And Bryan was their willing accomplice. Bryan has been referred to by George Marsden as the "George Custer of fundamentalism." He allowed himself to be tricked into taking the stand to defend God and the Bible. Darrow had a field day, mercilessly laying bare the flaws in Bryan's understanding of Scripture. In fact, it is widely assumed that Darrow and Scopes won the trial, but such was not the case. Bryan and the Fundamentalists won technically. Scopes lost and was fined $100. But the truth was that, in winning, Bryan lost the sympathy of many, because he managed to make belief in the inerrancy of Scripture seem so foolish, most people were afraid that they would appear as foolish as Bryan if they claimed to believe in it. Indeed, many Christians became indifferent to the issues Bryan and the Fundamentalists raised. Most became convinced that it was more important to do something about social problems than to argue about whether it had rained for forty days and nights in the days of Noah. Fundamentalism would not soon recover from this "victory." But that was not the end of it. ( Bryan actually died a week after the trial, and the verdict was eventually overturned.) As Robert Handy notes, "the prestige of Protestantism was further lessened by the bitter controversy that erupted between fundamentalists and modernists." Fundamentalists were determined to oust liberals from places of influence within the major denominations, and conducted witch-hunts not unlike those Senator McCarthy would use a generation later on a national level. The struggle between fundamentalists and moderates was fought in the years after World War I, and this total war evidently inspired the ecclesiastical combatants because it became an all out struggle in which the issues in question were to be settled once and for all. This campaign led to a bitter ten-year conflict that no one won. Fundamentalists enjoyed some success in their effort to purge those who did not profess faith in the five fundamentals, but they were unable to seize control of any of the major denominations. But the most significant aspect of this crusade was the resulting animosity and bitterness served to discredit religious institutions in general. Another consequence of the Scopes Trial and its aftermath was a growing awareness of Protestantism's inability to shape and inform American opinion. The pyrrhic victory in Dayton, Tennessee was matched by similar victories on behalf of Prohibition and the passage of Blue Laws to protect the Sabbath. But these victories did little to stop the emergence of new attitudes towards alcohol and recreation despite strenuous campaigns to reverse these trends. As the public came to see the clergy - not as intellectuals and leaders - but as boobs like Bryan and the assorted hypocrites who peopled such novels as Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry, respect declined, and the best and brightest ceased to be willing to enter the ministry. Intellectuals and the more thoughtful began to leave the church in droves. For additional reading, see Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992. According to a scholarly yet highly readable article by Carl E. Olson in Crisis Magazine (11/03), a Catholic journal on the church, politics, & culture, the major culprit turns out to be on John Nelson Darby, an ex-Anglican priest. Darby (1800-1882) came up with "dispensational theology" in the 1830s. It has been picked up and promoted by C.I. Scofield, who produced an edition of the KJV with dispensationalist annotations, and Lewis Sperry Chafer (1872-1952) whose Systematic Theology is the "Summa of the dispensationalists" according to Olson. Here's the link to the full article: |
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