Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective (11 page)

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Authors: Lawrence Kaplan

Tags: #Religion, #General, #Fundamentalism, #Comparative Religion, #Philosophy, #test

BOOK: Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective
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permitted. But what distinguishes the Mormons, the Witnesses, and the Christian Scientists is that they were despised minorities who were pleased to be tolerated and who had no great imperial ambitions. What makes the recent church-state conflicts serious is that they involve a very large minority that has imperial ambitions. Not surprisingly, given that their beliefs and values, language and thought once dominated very large parts of America, conservative Protestants want to see themselves as a moral
majority
.
To summarize, the people whom Jerry Falwell represents have not grown dramatically in numbers in the last fifteen years, although their ability to utilize new technology has raised their public profile. Liberals had simply forgotten that large numbers of people did not share their beliefs and values. The cosmopolitans and intellectuals who supervised the media and ran the bureaucracies of the major denominations had concentrated on the struggles for the rights of women and blacks, on the student movement, and on the protests against the Vietnam War, and neglected the American conservative Protestant. It is not so much fundamentalism but
public awareness
of fundamentalism that has been born again. Insofar as some element of growth was involved in the rise of the new Christian right, it was the growth of evangelical and fundamentalist self-confidence, part of which came as an incidental feature of the rise of the sunbelt.
Similarly, the increased politicization of fundamentalism should not be seen as a reaction, if by doing so one implies that it is fundamentalists who have changed markedly. Insofar as there is a reactive element, it is not in the beliefs and values of fundamentalism but in the subculture's recognition that, to hold what it had and to avoid losing more, it must actively resist. If one is looking for a single word to describe the rise of the new Christian right, then "reassertion" would be appropriate.
Fighting Back
Fundamentalists are moved to fight back, either by changing the content of liberal and cosmopolitan culture or, more typically, by resisting the incursions of that culture and demanding the right to social space. I have tried to show that such resistance has a series
 
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of ironic consequences. To have any chance of success, it must concede many of the things fundamentalists wish to preserve. When the concessions are not made, the NCR's claim to being a serious political movement is undermined. Given the smallness of the conservative Protestant population and its regional concentration, realistic political action requires pragmatism and accommodation. To have any hope of maintaining the social practices they believe their religion requires, fundamentalists must compromise what is distinctive about that religion. In the world view that creates the particular reasons conservative Protestants have for resisting modernism, Catholics and Jews are not Christians, and Mormonism is a dangerous cult. But legislative and electoral success requires that fundamentalists work in alliance with such groups and with secular conservatives.
The final irony of the position of contemporary fundamentalists is revealed in their attitude toward minority rights. Fundamentalists object to the language of group rights, first because their religious and political ideologies are constructed around individualism, and second because the groupsracial minorities, feminists, and homosexualswhich have so far deployed the notion of group rights represent causes that fundamentalists have to date opposed. Nevertheless, the new Christian right has been most successful in the public arena when it has presented its own cause as that of an oppressed and hard-done-by minority. As yet, this rhetoric appears only occasionally in fundamentalists' complaints about the neglect of their values and in the strategic thinking of NCR lobbyists and lawyers. But it is easy to imagine it taking hold and serving as a vehicle for coming to terms with modern America. The regionalism expressed in "states' rights" will become the pluralism of minority rights and with it will come the end of any dream of a Christian empire.
The Defeat of the NCR
It is perhaps premature to explain the failure of a social movement that has not yet died, but enough of the signs are already therein fact, have always been there for those who wished to see themfor us to attempt an explanation.
 
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The first point to make is that the potential support base for the NCR was always smaller than many commentators noticed. First, the movement has failed to attract the support of any significant number of conservative Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and others. But even if one confines the examination to conservative Protestants, it is clear that not all the members of those denominations which can sensibly be described as "conservative Protestant" share the religious or political beliefs of Jerry Falwell. Commentators who notice only the growth of conservative Protestantism relative to the mainstream denominations are liable to see it mistakenly as an homogeneous or coherent base for the NCR.
Consider the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest grouping of conservative Protestants. Much has recently been made of the capture of a number of key organizational positions in the convention by active supporters of the NCR.
3
One might suppose that the entire membership of the SBC can be counted as present or future NCR supporters, and journalists do make this mistake. Actually it is likely that more than half the SBC-affiliated congregations would stand apart from the NCR, either because they are sufficiently liberal to disagree with NCR positions or because, while themselves holding to such positions, they accept the right of others to disagree. A survey of the attitudes of 431 SBC pastors toward the Moral Majority showed that fewer than half were either members or supporters of the movement. Almost all the others described themselves as opponents (Guth 1983:120).
The rift between "orthodox" conservative Protestants and those who are becoming slightly more liberal is not the only important division. NCR supporters are also criticized from the separatist fundamentalist position associated with Bob Jones University and its graduates. In one of a series of pamphlets entitled
Fundamental Issues in the 80's,
John Ashbrook concludes his critique of Falwell's
The Fundamentalist Phenomenon
by arguing that Falwell has changed camps. Falwell's concern to promote social issues has led him to abandon his separation from apostasy, the touchstone of fundamentalism. Another pamphlet in the series is called
Enforced Morality Does Not Produce Revival
. Bob Jones III has clearly expressed the view of this element of conservative Protestantism:
 
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The aim of the Moral Majority is to join Catholics, Jews, Protestants of every stripe, Mormons, etc., in a common religious cause. Christians can fight on the battlefield alongside these people, can vote with them for a common candidate, but they cannot be unequally yoked with them in a religious army or organization. Morality is a matter of religion: a man's morality is based upon his religious beliefs. . . . Alliances we would avoid at the local level are not made acceptable or less ecumenical due to the national level on which they operate. . . . A close, analytical, biblical look at the Moral Majority . . . reveals a movement that holds more potential for hastening the church of Antichrist and building the ecumenical church than anything to come down the pike in a long time, including the charismatic movement. (Bob Jones III 1980:13)
That there is an element of truth in Jones's assessment is suggested by Falwell's response to the crisis in the PTL ministry which followed Bakker's disgrace. Falwell is a traditional fundamentalist; PTL is a pentecostal ministry. In theory, Falwell should have regarded PTL as the purveyor of an unbiblical deceit. Instead, he pledged to do all he could both to preserve the organization and to maintain its audience, and assured its supporters that it would continue to be pentecostal. He defended this compromise of fundamentalist orthodoxy on the ground that the collapse of the PTL network would be seen by liberals and secularists as a victory. In the face of such enemies, pan-Christian solidarity is more important than doctrinal rectitude. It seems that the pragmatic accommodation originally advanced for the Moral Majority but denied for the religious sphere has spread from the political to the religious.
Conservative Protestantism is internally divided by theology and by differences over the correct way to interpret the need for "separation from apostasy." A third source of division is, to some extent, related to this second point. Conservative Protestants are also divided on the issue of legislating righteousness. Their ambivalence about imposing their morality on others who do not share their views has its roots in a genuine commitment to democracy. At points I have talked about pragmatic accommodation as if it were something distasteful which the circumstances of the American polity has forced on the NCR. While there is a certain economy in presenting the story in that manner, if left unqualified it does an injustice to the con-
 
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servative Protestant tradition. Conservative Protestantism contains within it a tension between the obligation for the saints to rule righteously (even if that means imposing righteousness on the unregenerate), and the equally strong commitment to every individual's ability to discern the will of God. Although the latter tendency is theocratic rather than democratic, in practice it results in the same thing. And it is certainly the case that conservative Protestants have historically played a major part in the promotion of democracy and bourgeois individualism. It is the tragedy (in the strict sense of the word) of conservative Protestantism that one of its most valued consequences also undermines the conditions for its survival as the key source of values for a whole society rather than as the partial world view of a self-selecting minority of saints. This is the moral to be drawn from the many surveys that show ambivalence among conservative Protestants about movements such as the Moral Majority. On the one hand, conservative Protestants want to see the world "returned to biblical standards." On the other, their theology, ecclesiology, and history give them a strongly felt commitment to freedom of choice.
Some conservative Protestants choose pietistic retreat from the world on its own intrinsic merits as an alternative to imposing their righteousness on the unregenerate. For others it has been a sensible reaction to the failure of their more activist phases. The Reformed Presbyterians are a good example. In the early days of the Reformation in Scotland, the Reformed Presbyterians (or Covenanters) were the most radical "impositionists." When they failed to win over the majority of the Church, they maintained their rhetoric of the saints and the civil magistrate working in a godly harmony, while effectively retreating from the world. The American conservative Protestant tradition displays frequent alternation between periods of active involvement and retreat. Even when the activist element has been dominant there have been those who decry social and political involvement as a diversion, a waste of the energy that should be directed to the primary task of saving souls. It needs very little by way of disillusionment with the active mode to swing the pendulum back to pietistic retreat. Not being complete retreatists, the followers of

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