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11 May 2006 03:44 pm

Christianism, Debated

A reader comments:

I found myself earnestly wishing that a single sentence in your welcome piece on Christianism had been written differently:

"I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda."

Surely the issue is not the relative "importance" of faith; i.e. I am certain you do not mean to say that their religious faith is of greater importance to Christianists than it is to others. Had I godlike powers of editorship, I might rewrite the sentence to read:

"I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that the content of religious faith can be defined so precisely that it must also have a precise political agenda."

But my quibble merely indicates the intensity of my identification with the piece as a whole, after all.

An interesting point, and I gladly accept his formulation. What's problematic is the specificity and absolute certainty with which Christianists interpret God's will on, say, the moral status of a zygote, the "objective disorder" of gay love, or the precise moment when a person can be allowed to die. These are very difficult questions, and serious, moral people can disagree on them. No one in these areas, it seems to me, can claim a monopoly of divine wisdom - let alone the kind of zealous certainty that demands that such nuances be rigorously enforced by the civil law.

The thing about fundamentalism, though, is its totality. There is something in the fundamentalist psyche that not only demands complete submission to a certain "truth"; but subsequently a frenzied effort to remove and obliterate all threats to that truth - because it has become so psychologically important for your own spiritual survival. Doubt, in this view, is not a goad to faith, but a terrible threat to it - so doubt must be eradicated. That inevitably leads to the empowerment of government for the pursuit of Christianist ends, and to the loss of empirical prudence in governance. It leads to the loss of conservatism. My own view, and I develop it at length in my new book, "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How To Get It Back," is that there is a direct link between Bush's Christian fundamentalism and his administration's vast expansion of government power. He is using government to bring heaven closer to earth. He means well. They often do.

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