Watching the sparrow
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 7: The Lure of Fundamentalism
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Hugh Mackay
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Hugh Mackay's biography and other articles by this writer
Why should I feel discouraged, why should the shadows fall?
Why should my heart be lonely, and long for heaven and home?
When Jesus is my portion, my constant friend is he
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.
I sing because I'm happy,
I sing because I'm free,
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.
It's a seductive idea. I used to sing those words, back in the far-off days when I was myself an ardent fundamentalist. It's an old song, recently revived by the brilliant jazz/gospel a cappella group, The Idea of North. The words capture, better than any intellectual analysis could, the essence of Christian fundamentalism: there's a personal god out there who will watch over you in an individual way, paying attention to the specific details of your life, as long as you have committed yourself to belief in Jesus Christ as God's son and your personal saviour.
"His eye is on the sparrow" could serve as the theme song for the current revival of fundamentalism in Australia and around the world. And it's not only Christian fundamentalism that's on the rise: Islam and Judaism are experiencing similar surges of support for the conservative theology of the extreme right.
Fundamentalism involves a commitment to one central, simple, "fundamental" idea that underpins a complete world view. In Christian fundamentalism, that idea is that the Bible, being the inspired word of God, should be accepted as literally true. For fundamentalists, two crucial implications flow from that: we are all sinners, thanks to the genetic consequences of Adam's "fall" as described in the Book of Genesis, and we must accept of Jesus Christ as the "personal saviour" – the only pathway to salvation.
Those tenets are broadly within the evangelical tradition of Christianity, though the absolute literalist approach to scripture is more hardline than the approach many contemporary evangelicals would take. "Evangelical" is a term that derives from "evangel" or "good news": within the Christian church, it has historically referred to Christianity itself – the religion that rejected legalistic Judaism in favour of the "good news" of redemption of the world through faith in Jesus Christ, as outlined in the New Testament gospels.
Christian fundamentalism, as a narrow movement distinguishable from broad evangelicalism, was launched after World War I by a group of United States Baptists who published a series of paperbacks under the title, The Fundamentals, designed to impose a hardline literalism on biblical interpretation as a form of protest against modern liberalism. The early fundamentalists were convinced that the idea of America as a Christian civilisation was an illusion: in their view, the apparent decline of religious observance was paralleled by social decline as well. (It is no accident that the rise of fundamentalism occurred in the Prohibition era, when various protest movements were springing up in response to social as well as religious liberalism: indeed, fundamentalism should perhaps be regarded as part of a social-protest movement.)
More recently, the line between fundamentalism and evangelicalism has become blurred, partly because "fundamentalism", originally a desirable self-descriptor, has become a pejorative term in society at large, applied not only to Christianity but to other religions and, indeed, to various secular philosophies, such as feminism and economic rationalism. Today, many fundamentalists reject that label in favour of the broader term, "evangelical".
Still, the essence of Christian fundamentalism remains its belief in the inerrancy of the Bible and the corresponding need for a literal approach to biblical study that rejects new trends in scholarship and culture, especially the views of contemporary liberal theologians and biblical scholars who want to treat the Bible as a source of inspirational parables, myths and metaphors. Such theologians may regard "God" as a concept – like love or goodness – that bears little relationship to the ancient idea of a superhuman figure "out there". Fundamentalism will have none of that: indeed, part of its appeal is that it ignores contemporary scholarship in favour of the nostalgic certainty and simplicity of "old-time religion".
AT A TIME WHEN THE RATE OF CHANGE HAS DRIVEN AUSTRALIANS to swallow antidepressants in record numbers, when marriage and family life are under threat from a sustained high rate of divorce, a record low birthrate and a painful adjustment to the new realities of a post-feminist culture, when households are shrinking (more than half of all Australian households now contain only one or two people), when many Australians are learning to live with job insecurity and when our longstanding dream of an egalitarian society appears to be under challenge from the effects of a radical redistribution of work and wealth, the comfort of simple certainty is very welcome indeed.
But there's more to the contemporary appeal of fundamentalism than the promise of certainty. Though it may not be obvious at first glance, the current surge of religious fundamentalism in Australia may also be connected to two of our national preoccupations: the growing emphasis on me – self-discovery, self-absorption, self-indulgence – and the closely connected embrace of materialism.
The obsession with "me" is partly the heritage of the baby-boom generation, which responded to the postwar economic boom with such unbridled enthusiasm. Living under the constant threat of a nuclear holocaust, baby boomers' response was to become impatient and voraciously self-indulgent consumers: "We're not here for a long time; we're here for a good time." They quickly learned that borrowing and spending were the ways to achieve the "good time" they craved, so they jettisoned the savings ethic of their parents' generation, along with many of their parents' moral and spiritual values. They became known around the world as the Me Generation.
In turn, they passed on their materialistic values to their children. They may have raised the first generation of young Australians who were not exposed to traditional Christian teachings on a large scale, since it was the boomers who presided over the free fall in church attendance during the last quarter of the 20th century, but their children are now becoming deeply interested in what they call "spirituality". The meaning of life is a hot topic among the young, which doesn't mean they've abandoned materialism but simply that they've decided "there's more to life than Nike".
But the self-centredness of contemporary Australia is also partly a reaction to the anxiety that has occurred in epidemic proportions in Australia for the past 25 years or so, as we have been swept by a series of revolutions that have challenged many of our traditional perceptions of the Australian way of life – the women's movement, the restructure of the economy, the technology revolution and even a revolution in our sense of ourselves as an increasingly diverse, multicultural society. Not everyone has welcomed these changes and even those who have embraced them have often found it a challenge to adjust their thinking to this new kind of Australia.
In response, many Australians have turned their focus inward, as a means of insulating themselves from what's been going on in the world beyond their front fences. Globalisation, Aboriginal reconciliation, international terrorism, foreign investment, population policy, environmental disasters, sustainable development, tax reform ... too many of these issues have seemed beyond their control and, in any case, they have become wearied by the rate of change. They have sought consolation and compensation for their feelings of powerlessness by bringing their horizons up close and concentrating on things they can control: backyards, home renovations, children's schooling, holidays.
They have become disengaged from the political, social and economic agenda because it has all become too daunting. Terrorism? Pass me another snag. The invasion of Iraq? We won, didn't we? Let's move on. An election campaign? Wake me when it's over. When the mood is as insular as it is at present, self-indulgence looks like an effective strategy for making us feel better about ourselves, and retail therapy is achieved, at least in the short term, by simply spending a few dollars on yourself.
Such a retreat from big-picture issues may be bad for the health of our democracy, and it may lead – as it now appears to be doing – to an outbreak of prejudice against "outsiders", to a loss of compassion for the underprivileged or the disadvantaged, and to a less tolerant attitude towards ethnic, religious, sexual or cultural minorities. But it does offer people a break from the struggle to keep up. Many television viewers, for instance, are quite explicit about their tendency to switch from current affairs to "lifestyle" as a way of seeking relief from a rougher, tougher world.
SO THE GROWING OBSESSION WITH ME AND MY LIFE, ME AND MY KIDS, me and my house, me and my rights reflects our desire to find a manageable agenda. And the new wave of religious fundamentalism taps directly into this yearning not only for certainty, but also for simplicity ... and for an emphasis on me.
Fundamentalism has always been about me and my salvation; me and my personal relationship to God; me and my own peace of mind. Themes such as social justice or practical concern for society's disadvantaged and marginalised are less central to the fundamentalist's world view than they are for some other Christian groups. Indeed, hardline fundamentalists tend to be sceptical about the "social gospel" in the same way as they are about traditional sacred music, religious icons or stained glass. Even the Salvation Army is sometimes regarded as suspect because of its non-judgemental compassion for the deadbeats and derelicts of society, and the trendies of the Uniting Church, buying into political debate and getting worked up about the plight of refugees, are likely to be regarded as missing the real point.
For fundamentalists, that "real point" concerns personal faith and personal religious experience – especially "conversion". Their interest in the wider community is dominated by a religious rather than a social agenda. "Bring them in with all their sin, He'll wash them white as snow," we sang, with brutal simplicity, in the '50s. The words and music might be more sophisticated today (though some visitors to currently popular fundamentalist strongholds complain that the words are indecipherable under the amplified onslaught of the band), but the emphasis hasn't changed.
While other Christians may be wondering how they can express their faith in charitable acts that respond to the needs of a wounded community, the fundamentalists want souls, and they want them on their own terms. In the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, for instance, where fundamentalists have become a powerful force, the primary focus of a recently agreed "mission" was not to marshal the resources of the diocese in order to relieve the suffering of the homeless or disadvantaged of Sydney, but to get 10 per cent of the population of Sydney attending Bible-based churches within the next 10 years. Fundamentalists love numbers: it's typical of their quantitative approach to success that they would set themselves such a precise numerical target. Their constant challenge is to swell the ranks of converts (which, by the way, they are doing: Sydney is the only Anglican diocese in Australia actually increasing its numbers).