Oh dear, this historical piece is not going to go down well with many believers. What’s more, it is published on a Sabbath. Quite a religious wet blanket. It is entitled “The day Christian fundamentalism was born”.
After reading it, I felt like I can look at the fundamentalist mirror and see a bit of myself in it. That image is not only human, but very human.
For a piece this informative, you need the deft mind of a history professor, Mathew Avery Suttton. He is an author and professor of history at Washington State University.
Here is what I gathered from reading this long piece of literary work.
All was peaceful at the Christian front after the dust of Martin Luther’s 95 theses nailed to the Wittenberg’s church door had settled.
That was an urgent call for believers at that time to wake up to the reality of everyday abuses of the practicing priesthood. The distortions of the Bible and the practice of it had to be challenged and reformed, and Martin Luther did just that.
Mind you, it started a revolution and many wars before it finally secured some semblance of order and peace.
But that peace did not last long in the Christendom. Just when you think it is safe to go back to the baptismal waters for some innermost cleansing, the eerie religious fins circling the dead calm seas came in the form of modernity.
About 400 years later, the new enemy of Christianity emerged from the horizon in 1919, after the First World War. Amidst the chaos, the death tolls and the torn European states, a group of Christian leaders were getting really anxious of developments brewing at that time.
Led by baptist preacher William Bell Riley, “6000 ministers, theologians and evangelists came together in Philadelphia for a week-long series of meetings”. That date was May 25, 1919. Mark that date, because your current faith has some of its roots in that fateful meeting.
If Newton’s third law of motion helps to illustrate my point, then history in some ways is about ”one body exerting a force on a second body, and the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.”
This first force is the perceived ills of modernity, and the second force is the fundamentalist Christianised push back or backlash, with equal, if not more determined force, applied against it.
And if the first force is the wave of modernity, then the second force is the rise of the apocalypse. Yes, nothing arouses the heart and imagination of believers more than the defining script of the end of the world. That’s what the fundamentalist Christians are all about.
Professor Sutton wrote: “The men and woman assembled there believe that God had chosen them to call Christians back to the “fundamentals” of the faith, and to prepare the world for one final revival before Jesus returned to earth.””
That’s the consummate zeal of the second-force backlash against the first force where these few factors converged for the perfect storm.
First factor were the eschatological problems that the cat of modernity dragged in, and it came in as the League of Nations. Nothing spooks the end-time believer more than the coming together of the human states, united in a babelian tower of one government.
“One predicted that the leader of the League of Nations would likely be “the Politico-Beast described in Daniel, and in the Book of Revelation...the Anti-Christ.” This belief is significant because it “drove them to support the Senate’s “irreconcilables”, those who fought the president’s efforts to join the league.””
That was part of how the Trojan horse of fundamentalism got into the highest echelons of government.
Second factor was the return of Jews to the Holy Land, which must precede the second coming. And fortuitously, in 1917, “the British captured Jerusalem...and declared Palestine a homeland for Jews.” That seems like “indisputable proof to fundamentalists that the prophecy was being fulfilled.”
Next factor was the fear that in the end times, oppressive government would crack down and persecute Christians. This was the rising existential anxiety at the time, and it only gave more mojo to Newton’s third law of reactionary fundamentalist forces.
The fourth factor would be familiar to many college students reading his text. Yes, it was that bearded man who married a devout Christian wife and who died an agnostic - Charles Darwin - the bête noire of the fundamentalist movement, if not the main cause of their fanatic rise.
Evolution threatened to replace God as the creator of humankind and us in the center of his divine plan, if not the universe (for that, we have Copernicus to thank, or blame).
Professor Sutton wrote: “Riley and the more strident fundamentalists, however, associated evolution with last-days atheism, and they made it their mission to purge it from the schoolroom.”
The last (but not least) factor was declining morals, which has always been the common thread running throughout the history of humanity.
“What fundamentalists viewed as declining morals served as yet more evidence that the Bible’s prophets had accurately forecast the modern age. Jesus he said that just before his return, humans would be acting as they had in the days or Noah and of Lot.”
There you have, the five factors (and more) that gave birth to Christian fundamentalism.
But the irony of it is that their fight against the perceived ills of modernity does not offer any antidote or solutions, or stand as a prevailing counterculture, as first enunciated by Jesus at the Sermon on the Mount. It however mutated into becoming modernity’s strange bedfellow sharing the same morally dubious political bed.
If evolution has spawned eugenics, then fundamentalism has spawned the Christian Right and the Moral Majority. The fundamentalist Christians have taken Jesus’ assertion to Pontius Pilate that my kingdom is not of this world to making His kingdom a centerpiece of this world.
They have taken the institutional laws and political powers into their own hands and wrought it in such a way that the remnants at the center of worldly authority is not so much what Jesus has taught, but what they think is what Jesus had taught. Their backlash, once stripped of its noble intentions, is nothing more than a desire to elevate their teachings and fame into worldly prominence.
Alas, only via distortion of scriptures (for self-preservation) can they forcefully install the kingdom of God in the place of power, fame and prosperity, with the hearts of men rarely transformed as Christ had first intended.
And because they cannot imagine going back to the time of Acts when Peter told the lame man that “silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk“, they have to rely on modernity’s equivalent of silver and gold to effect changes of hearts and minds, not knowing that such reliance does not establish God’s kingdom to its rightful place, but only their very own.
Lesson? Just one, and it is the ad nauseam repetition of history.
Recently, I have spoken to a few young adults and the same theme kept cropping up. It is about the numbers. It is about an existential or apocalyptic urgency to fill the church seats. It is about attracting the flocks who have left back. It is about being seeker-sensitive, making services to revolve around them, pursuing their needs, incentivising faith so that it becomes attractive, if not seductive, to the millennials.
The impression given is thus about putting the “attendance” carriage before the “gospel” horses.
People become a means to an end, and not an end in itself as Jesus would have done with one-to-one transformation like that of Peter, Mary, Zaccheus and even Paul, in his Damascus journey.
Professor Sutton observed that one may think “the God of the fundamentalist is one God; the God of the modernist is another. The Christ of the fundamentalist is one Christ; the Christ of the modernist is another. The Bible of fundamentalist is one Bible; the Bible of modernism is another.”
But he begs to differ. They are all the same.
He wrote: “Although fundamentalists claimed to represent the traditional faith, they were pioneering innovators who remade Christianity for tumultuous times. There was little "conservative" about them. Although fundamentalists made modernist theology one of their primary enemies, they drew on modernist thought and practice just as much as their liberal counterparts.”
“Their dependence on modernism was most obvious in how they read their Bibles. They treated it like an engineering manual. They saw individual verses as pieces of data that they could extract, classify, cross-reference, quantify, place into taxonomies and then reassemble, to form something new.”
Alas, the same can be said of some church movements, which they call revival, riding on what they claim is a new vision, with new offerings to revive the hearts, when the many jaded believers see it as another fundamentalist attempt to “remake Christianity for tumultuous times” - as they see it, from their existential point of view, of course. Cheerz.
No comments:
Post a Comment