IN THE PREVIOUS POST, I addressed the first of three reasons that fundamentalists are easily won over by right-wing propaganda: political thinking.

"Ignoring the evidence in order to come to the correct conclusion, as defined by an authoritarian teaching voice is, for fundamentalists, a spiritual discipline."

They are taught, and practice, the fine art of choosing their beliefs by considering the outcome rather than the evidence.

They are taught, and practice, the fine art of guilt by association—of evaluating a person by who he can be associated with instead of his own actions.

You have to wonder what they would have made of Jesus, who hung out with publicans, prostitutes, and sinners.

The second reason in my short list is the one I take up today.

Fundamentalism is authoritarian.

If you don't decide issues on evidence you need some criteria, and that becomes authority.

Most fundamentalists will tell you that their authority is the Bible, and they do really believe that's true.

But it isn't.

The number of fundamentalists who are even capable of interpreting an ancient text with any degree of faithfulness is exactly zero.

That's a pretty radical statement, but true—the reason being that anything approaching a reading that is faithful to the text leaves a fundamentalist in an impossible situation.

The fundamentalist must either disagree with the Bible or cease to be a fundamentalist.

This fact is—forgive the expression—fundamental to fundamentalist experience.

One case in point is the one I mentioned in the previous post: abortion.

In my days as a fundamentalist it was considered a Catholic issue, and never came up.

After it was politicized in the Reagan era, there was hardly a fundamentalist church that didn't preach against it.

But had they actually "searched the scriptures" as we used to say, fundamentalists would have found that the only open question, according to their Bibles, was whether human life began at birth—with the first breath—or a month later—when the child was named: a particularly important issue within the Biblical world-view.

Had they actually consulted their Bibles on the issue, they would have had to, at the very least, come out on the side of choice—since there was absolutely nothing in their Bibles to justify an uncompromising stance on the issue, and much to indicate that their own stance was questionable.

But of course they didn't.

It is only by practicing the constant repression of what the passage before their eyes actually says, in favor of what the pastor or commentary says it says, that fundamentalists can remain fundamentalists.

We went to church three times a week, and most of the service was spent listening to an authority figure address the congregation about what some passage or other actually meant.

Much of our mental energy in those sessions was spent practicing the art of agreeing with the voice of authority while discounting the evidence before our eyes.

But the authoritarianism was not limited to belief.

It was extended to behavior.

We were taught that sacrificing oneself to the will of God, who was represented primarily as a rich and powerful king, was the ultimate good.

It was wrong to look out for yourself.

It was right to give up all self concern in order to serve the wealth and power of God.

So it should not come as any surprise that the religious right is willing, time and again, to sacrifice their own interests to the interests of the wealthy and the powerful—to vote against themselves.

They have an enormous amount of practice in doing just that.

It should come as no surprise that a Rush Limbaugh or a Glenn Beck, both of whom sound remarkably like fundamentalist preachers, can get their base to ignore the evidence in favor of bizarre political fantasies.

Ignoring the evidence in order to come to the correct conclusion, as defined by an authoritarian teaching voice is, for fundamentalists, a spiritual discipline.

It's something they practice every time they go to church, and they are extremely skilled at it.

Next: Fundamentalism is Adversarial