I'VE BEEN TRYING, LATELY, TO SORT OUT my thoughts and feelings about the religious right.
I had a conversation recently with a friend who is no extremist, but still would place himself in that general area.
He was upset about the recent events at Fort Hood, and wondering why the military would have allowed a Muslim to join.
I pointed out that most Muslims were not terrorists anymore than most Christians were, and that virtually all American Muslims were as loyal to this country as he was.
After a while, he narrowed his focus to "fundamentalist Muslims," and I found myself agreeing with him that, yes, "the real problem was probably Fundamentalism."
Privately, I was thinking that the danger of Fundamentalism was not a function, in any special way, of Islam .
It got me to wondering, though.
I was raised a fundamentalist Christian.
I grew up in a world where it was considered a real, theological, question whether it was a sin to dance, or go to a movie, or play cards.
The youth magazine which was distributed every Sunday at my church attacked Peter, Paul, and Mary as godless radicals, out to corrupt the youth of America.
The head of the fundamentalist college where I spent my freshman year began an assembly, on the day President Kennedy was shot, by saying, "Well, we wanted him out, but not this way."
So there's a real sense in which it is not surprising, or shouldn't be, that the religious right is now selling mugs and tee-shirts with a Bible verse on them which implies, to those who know their Bibles, that our current president should be killed.
But I still find it hard to believe.
For one thing, the nastiness I witnessed as a young man was confined to a few hardliners.
The President of that college may have made such a remark, but a good part of the student body got up and walked out when he did it.
They didn't rush out to buy a mug with the remark printed on it.
That youth magazine may have printed an attack on Peter, Paul, and Mary, but my parents never complained about my collection of their records, and most of my fundamentalist friends listened to them, as well—and even to (shudder!) Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.
It was at a party for the senior class from my conservative Christian high school that I first heard The Doors.
So when I see the people I grew up with do and say such unbelievably un-American and un-Christian things, I find it hard to understand what has happened to them in the intervening years.
I've been puzzling over this, and here's what I think so far:
I think that the problem really is Fundamentalism.
I know a great many very religious people, and the vast majority of them find the religious right just as frightening and just as puzzling as I do.
The problem with Fundamentalism is that it encourages people in a whole list of bad habits.
My candidates for the worst three:
- It encourages them to speak and think politically.
Fundamentalists are subtly taught—from the cradle up—to judge an idea, not by the evidence for or against it, but by where it may lead.
I remember being told that the reason dancing was wrong was that it would lead to sex.
I was also told that though square-dancing was not particularly sexual, it could lead to other forms of dancing, and therefore was also wrong.
Of course the adults who patiently explained this to me had no idea how many steps they saved the teens parked in the church lot.
But the form of thought was typical.
We questioned evolution, because it might lead us to doubt the existence of God—it was the first step on a slippery slope.
Some didn't go to Disney movies because they would be "supporting the same industry that made pornography." If I went to see Mary Poppins, it could lead somehow to some guy in a raincoat slipping into a porn house on the other side of town.
This is the same reasoning we now find on the right in general.
No one in their right mind believes that a public option—a self-supporting government run health insurance program, competing with other insurance programs—is equivalent to socialized medicine—a system in which all health providers, doctors, nurses, administrators, and janitors, are government employees.
But the right keeps talking about it as though it is, the same way that Mary Poppins was "the same thing" as pornography because they were both on acetate.
They keep implying it could lead to socialized medicine, with no explanation of how .
It's closely related to the whole idea of guilt by association, another fundamentalist habit.
Oddly enough, we were not, in those days, anti-abortionists. But this was also political, and probably related to that college president's remark about Kennedy.
Kennedy's sin, at the time, was being Roman Catholic. Catholics were bad. They had the wrong theology, they worshiped idols, and we were not entirely certain that the pope wasn't the anti-Christ.
And, of course, opposition to birth control and abortion were Catholic ideas, therefore they were not to be considered.
The political right-wing has picked up the same habit, but does it more skillfully.
Kennedy was a Roman Catholic, after all. But there is no serious evidence that Saddam had anything to do with nine eleven, and yet the association between him and that fateful event was used by the right to justify America invading Iraq.
Any more than there is any reason to believe that something President Obama's pastor, or some guy he served on a committee with, said or did throws any light at all on the president's political agenda.
In both cases, the right wing has adopted the fundamentalist habits of asking where a belief might lead instead of whether it is true , of tainting a person through associations, instead of paying attention to what they say and do.
Next: Authoritarianism...
