Watching the sparrow - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 7: The Lure of Fundamentalism
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Hugh Mackay
The preoccupation with personal salvation can easily lead fundamentalists to adopt a certain smugness about their position. At their best, fundamentalists are inclined to regard the rest of us with pity; at their worst, they see the "unsaved" as inferior beings who will pay an eternal price for their obstinacy – and, for them, that will include the followers of any other faith – Islam, Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism – that fails to acknowledge the "one true faith". For this reason, fundamentalists are typically resistant to inter-faith initiatives now gathering momentum in various parts of the world, including Australia. But many fundamentalists are even opposed to ecumenical movements within Christianity itself, on the grounds that they alone understand the pure essence of the gospel. (Baptists, for instance, have consistently refused to join the Australian Council of Churches.)
Though fundamentalism, like any system of religious beliefs, is supposed to be about supplying religious answers to life's questions and emphasising the spiritual over the material, the sense of superiority inherent in fundamentalism sometimes produces a curious twist. For Christians who are supposed to value humility, poverty, self-sacrifice and compassion, there's a surprising emphasis among fundamentalists on material prosperity as a sign of God's blessing on them. In what looks like a contradiction of the messages of the New Testament about poverty, restraint and self-sacrifice, many of them speak as if God is personally rewarding their faith with commercial and material success. Far from being embarrassed by wealth, they welcome it as evidence that they are on the right track.
In some of the biggest Pentecostal churches, for example, the pursuit of wealth is explicitly encouraged (partly so that generous donations can be made to the church) and the perceived wealth of the ministers is seen as a sign of God's blessing on their work. This is a recurring theme: back in the 1950s, a member of the committee that organised a visit to Sydney by the Billy Graham Crusade remarked that the Graham organisation "was sincere about everything but money". He meant that there was a huge emphasis on income generation in the conduct of the crusades, but perhaps he hadn't then understood what has become clearer since – that the theology of fundamentalism rather conveniently embraces material prosperity. "God is good to me," is their defence, if they are called upon to supply one.
The emotional security offered by fundamentalism extends to the strong sense of connectedness between the members of fundamentalist congregations. Of course, all churches potentially offer a sense of community to their congregations but the experience of belonging is often richer and more emotionally charged in the fundamentalist context. Constant reinforcement of the same, simple message (that the Bible has all the answers), combined with strong emotional stimuli through music, testimonies of the faithful and, in the most extreme cases, swooning and "speaking in tongues", all serve as powerful affirmation that we are bound together in our faith. Social contact outside the church community is sometimes explicitly discouraged, reinforcing the sense of belonging to a closed, secure group.
DOES IT WORK? WHEN PENTECOSTAL CHURCHES LIKE HILLSONG in Sydney's north-west and the Christian City Churches in various parts of Australia attract congregations of several thousand to a single service, you'd have to say it does. For people who are feeling lonely, disconnected or even alienated from their communities, the appeal of such a palpable sense of belonging is obvious. Generally speaking, you'll never get a warmer welcome anywhere than on the doorstep of a fundamentalist church ("Bring them in with all their sin," etc).
It is an open question as to whether people who are drawn into fundamentalism will be satisfied by it for long. Some spend their lives happily ploughing the same field and never feeling the need to move on. They will never tremble before those mysteries of life that trouble the rest of us. We may regard doubt as the very engine of faith; for the fundamentalists, faith is indistinguishable from certain knowledge.
But others do move on, finally coming to feel that things aren't quite as simple as the fundamentalists would have us believe, or that to stick with such a simple system of religious beliefs might lock them into a kind of perpetual spiritual adolescence. Among young people, in particular, anecdotal evidence suggests there is quite a high turnover rate as they are initially drawn to the emotional intensity and overweening confidence of fundamentalism, often throwing themselves into it with a commitment bordering on fanaticism, only to weary of it, or "see through it", or, in a sense, fall out of love with it.
The separation can be painful. A friend of mine who tore himself away from a fundamentalist congregation in the 1960s was told by his minister that he was "turning his back on God"; as if there were no other authentic pathway to religious experience and no other acceptable form of religious faith. When I made my own break, never to set foot inside a church again for 20 years, a sympathetic priest later remarked that the only way to break free of the strictures of fundamentalism was to get right out of the church altogether, so that a fresh approach to the mysteries of faith could subsequently be taken (one that acknowledged, perhaps, the centrality of doubt in religious faith).
For many young people, the most powerful of all the attractions of fundamentalism lies in its heady mixture of faith and sex. Being generally anti-intellectual in its emphasis ("Why would a Christian want to study philosophy," I was once asked by a deacon in the church I attended as a youth), fundamentalism offers an emotionally charged, almost primitive experience of religion to those who abandon themselves to it. When the hormones are racing through the body of a young adult, it's often hard to tell whether the sense of ecstasy is sexual or religious, or a complex blend of the two.
But it's also about being on the winning side. Even as a young "fundo", I was always a bit perplexed by the apparent contradiction between our embrace of the New Testament gospel and its "law of love" and our lingering enthusiasm for some of the most gruesome and prescriptive bits of the Old Testament as well. In particular, we loved the stories of God protecting his chosen people – the Jews, originally, but now taken to mean "us".
For the Lion of Judah will break ev'ry chain
And give us the vict'ry again and again.
Our lusty rendition of choruses like those stimulated our conviction that we were in a struggle – not only against the devil and all his works, but also against the heretics within our own gates. Heretics included Catholics, Seventh-day Adventists, Mormons and, especially, Jehovah's Witnesses. (Muslims were too remote, too foreign, to be of much concern.) Since then, the Catholic Church has spawned its own breed of guitar-strumming fundamentalists, so perhaps a bridge has been built between them and the hardline literalists on the Protestant side (though I suspect there'd still be a sneaking suspicion, as there was in my day, that the Catholic Church was really "the whore of Babylon" or even the antichrist, as described in the Book of Revelation).
Underneath all this is the persistent appeal of security. Others may grapple with the meaning of their lives; fundamentalists know the meaning of theirs, and it's as much to do with the afterlife and their assured place in it as with the here-and-now. For the committed fundamentalist, the sense of having found "the answer" is deeply reassuring and, if you are convinced that the Bible is like a road map for your life (or, as fundamentalists are fond of saying, "the Maker's instruction manual"), you will feel as if you're able to avoid the angst that plagues the postmodern world. You may find it convenient to be rather selective in the bits of the Bible you choose to obey: you might choose, for example, to overlook some of the more bizarre Old Testament prescriptions coming out of ancient cultural contexts, such as the prohibition on the eating of pork or the barring of disabled people from approaching the altar; you may wish to tone down some of the encouragement to destroy your enemies or to take multiple wives; and you may not find answers to some contemporary moral dilemmas like the rights and wrongs of embryonic stem-cell research or human cloning, or the right way to treat prisoners captured in the war on terror. But confidence is the stock-in-trade of fundamentalism, so such niggles will be easily brushed aside.
FOR ADOLESCENTS STRUGGLING WITH THE CHALLENGES OF THEIR OWN, often erratic, emotional development, this kind of certainty (no matter how irrational) has always been seductive. In the Age of Discontinuity, we are all increasingly vulnerable to its blandishments. So does that mean Australia is in for a widespread religious revival led by the fundamentalists? Was Family First's modest entry into politics at the 2004 federal election a sign that the religious conservatives are about to exert a more orchestrated effect on politics? Is the more liberal, inclusive branch of the church on its last legs?
History suggests that the answer to all these questions is "no". For a start, the current wave of fundamentalism will inevitably abate as Australian society itself settles into a more conservative cycle and Australians, en masse, more famous as lotus-eaters than activists, are unlikely to become any more passionate about religion than they have been about anything else.
Professor Horst Priessnitz, a Dutch scholar who has made a comparative study of the cultural histories of Australia and America, has been particularly struck by the different religious climates of these two New World nations. Whereas the seeds of American colonial civilisation were sown in the puritanism of the Pilgrim Fathers, European settlement in Australia was, from the point of view of religion, inauspicious. "Australia was founded at the time of the Enlightenment and its character formed by men and women who shared the preoccupations of that period. Eighteenth-century science seemed to have established a universe that no longer needed God as an explanation of its development and further progress ... If Australia is frequently described as the Garden of Eden, it is a garden from which God, not Adam and Eve, has been banished," Priessnitz wrote in "Dreams in Austerica" in Anglia, a German journal of comparative cultural studies.
In these early years of the 21st century, the echoes of our godless origins can still be heard in our
rampant materialism and hedonism. This may provide fundamentalism with a focal point for its essential
role as a social protest movement, but there's little evidence to suggest that, in the Australian context, it
will prevail. ♦