Unpacking Fundamentalism

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21 Apr 2008 02:38 pm

The subject has spawned a very engrossing debate online. Larison criticizes Rollins here. I was most taken with a commenter's post, however:

The main feature of fundamentalism, I'd suggest, is exclusion - both in the realm of doctrinal logic and in human relations. The main feature of Jesus’ message is inclusion, both in doctrine and in human relations. Love, in other words. I don’t think reduction of a message to a few essential precepts is, in itself, fundamentalism. Obviously Jesus himself reduced the entire message of the Judaic tradition to a few precepts, such as “God is love”. The question is whether these precepts are treated as exclusive and hostile to the rest of the tradition, and intolerant of other traditions,, or inclusive and openly disposed towards the rest of the tradition, and tolerantly disposed towards other traditions... In other words, there are forms of religious fundamentalism which are indistinguishable from narcissism.

I don't think opposing fundamentalism requires that orthodoxy itself vanish. What it requires is that small space between orthodoxy and doubt that allows faith to breathe. When all such space is extinguished, when faith is about submission to an external authority tout court, when conscience is abolished or redefined as obedience, then we have exaggerated what we can claim to know about God. This is as much an attitude as anything else.

Another way of looking at this is to see fundamentalism as a version of faith rooted in fear - of error, of choice, of doubt, of mystery. And yet Jesus' constant instruction was not to be afraid. I see in Benedict's cramped attempt to control all discourse within the church a function of fear. It does not sum up all that Benedict is and means - he has brought many good impulses to the fore as well. But in the end, he is of that scared generation - the generation of 1968. The Church is as much a captive of those debates and experiences as our political culture is.

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