Monday, February 19, 2007
Why Fundamentalism Happens
Andrew Sullivan ponders the significance of a study that says conservative Christians are more likely to have been divorced than atheists and agnostics. I don't find this surprising at all. I've long thought that the trend toward fundamentalism is a product of the perception that the world is getting worse and that something stringent needs to be done about it. We can see this in the Muslim world, where the increasing liberalization of their traditional way of life is changing their society in new and unseen ways; and we can see it in America, where people are turning more and more toward more radical and literal interpretaions of our version of the good book. People turn to strict observance of age-old dogmas because they are afraid of the modern world.
Add to that the zeal of the newly-converted, and you have set the conditions for fundamentalism to flourish.
My own parents serve as an object-lesson in this. Both of them lived through the 60's, and while neither participated fully in the "tune in, turn on, drop out" culture of the bay area in those days (Dad was a grad student at Berkeley and Mom lived in San Francisco in 1969), they didn't reject it out of hand, either. After the societal degradation they witnessed during the 70's, they were searching for something real, something to make sense of the crazy world they had seen change before their eyes. When Christ came a-knocking (in the form of their 6-year-old son, yours truly, who wanted to go to church because the girl down the street did) they grabbed at it. It was what presented itself in their moment of need.
A couple of years later, they were homeschooling me in the ways of Christian fundamentalism: we watched the 700 Club every morning, we learned all about the "holes" in the theory of evolution, and we learned about the "Christian History" of America, as taught by charlatans and faux-historians such as Rousas John Rushdoony, David Barton and Peter Marshall. Mom even chaired the Pat Robertson for President campaign in our area. They indoctrinated me into the religious right, which, to their credit, was what they believed to be the truth.
I was able to escape that dogma through keeping an open mind and doing research of my own, but I often wonder if part of the reason I was able to see behind that curtain was simply a function of having never had it as bad as they did; at least in terms of world-upheaval. I didn't grow up in the post-war boom, I never saw the Eisenhower years, I missed Watergate entirely, and I never had to deal with the excesses of the drug culture.
My parents did, ultimately, teach me to seek the truth behind the way the mainstream presents it. This bit of skepticism turned out to be the foundation of my own skepticism, which has led me to atheism (or at least agnosticism, which in my case is practically the same thing), distrust of government, and distrust of authority, even religious authority.
I well remember learning about how John Wycliffe bravely challenged the prevailing Catholic orthodoxy to publish the Bible in English. I managed to translate that lesson into challenging the puritanical American orthodoxy's stranglehold on what constitutes "Christian" behavior. I also learned to be scrupulous about telling the truth and being humble about my estimation of my own abilities. I also learned to value the American experiment for its focus on the reason ("God's viceroy," to quote John Donne) of the average person. I was brought up to be a child of God, I ended up being a child of the Enlightenment.
Another thing about my parents: one was a divorcee (the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree there) and the other had a child out of wedlock. So they had made mistakes they weren't keen on repeating. In a lot of ways this caused them to rear me correctly, which has ultimately, ironically, made enough of an independent thinker of me to make a free thinker of me.
So I'm not surprised that conservative Christians are more likely to have been divorced. It is precisely that sort of foundational experience (or "Primal Scene," to use Freud's term) that lends itself to such an abrupt and total change in outlook.
http://www.forret.com/tools/trackback.asp?title=Why Fundamentalism Happens&blog_name=Decline and Fall&url=http://www.declineandfall.net/2007/02/why-fundamentalism-happens.html
Add to that the zeal of the newly-converted, and you have set the conditions for fundamentalism to flourish.
My own parents serve as an object-lesson in this. Both of them lived through the 60's, and while neither participated fully in the "tune in, turn on, drop out" culture of the bay area in those days (Dad was a grad student at Berkeley and Mom lived in San Francisco in 1969), they didn't reject it out of hand, either. After the societal degradation they witnessed during the 70's, they were searching for something real, something to make sense of the crazy world they had seen change before their eyes. When Christ came a-knocking (in the form of their 6-year-old son, yours truly, who wanted to go to church because the girl down the street did) they grabbed at it. It was what presented itself in their moment of need.
A couple of years later, they were homeschooling me in the ways of Christian fundamentalism: we watched the 700 Club every morning, we learned all about the "holes" in the theory of evolution, and we learned about the "Christian History" of America, as taught by charlatans and faux-historians such as Rousas John Rushdoony, David Barton and Peter Marshall. Mom even chaired the Pat Robertson for President campaign in our area. They indoctrinated me into the religious right, which, to their credit, was what they believed to be the truth.
I was able to escape that dogma through keeping an open mind and doing research of my own, but I often wonder if part of the reason I was able to see behind that curtain was simply a function of having never had it as bad as they did; at least in terms of world-upheaval. I didn't grow up in the post-war boom, I never saw the Eisenhower years, I missed Watergate entirely, and I never had to deal with the excesses of the drug culture.
My parents did, ultimately, teach me to seek the truth behind the way the mainstream presents it. This bit of skepticism turned out to be the foundation of my own skepticism, which has led me to atheism (or at least agnosticism, which in my case is practically the same thing), distrust of government, and distrust of authority, even religious authority.
I well remember learning about how John Wycliffe bravely challenged the prevailing Catholic orthodoxy to publish the Bible in English. I managed to translate that lesson into challenging the puritanical American orthodoxy's stranglehold on what constitutes "Christian" behavior. I also learned to be scrupulous about telling the truth and being humble about my estimation of my own abilities. I also learned to value the American experiment for its focus on the reason ("God's viceroy," to quote John Donne) of the average person. I was brought up to be a child of God, I ended up being a child of the Enlightenment.
Another thing about my parents: one was a divorcee (the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree there) and the other had a child out of wedlock. So they had made mistakes they weren't keen on repeating. In a lot of ways this caused them to rear me correctly, which has ultimately, ironically, made enough of an independent thinker of me to make a free thinker of me.
So I'm not surprised that conservative Christians are more likely to have been divorced. It is precisely that sort of foundational experience (or "Primal Scene," to use Freud's term) that lends itself to such an abrupt and total change in outlook.
Labels: fundamentalism, personal, reason, religion
