A Religion of Fear
One of the greatest challenges in life is attaching your existence to a faith that demands constant obedience. This mode of viewing the world can be deeply taxing on the soul. It’s worth noting the layered impacts it can have on the human psyche, which may also affect the physical state of the adherent through psychosomatic complications.
Christians are unique because their salvation depends entirely on God. Other faith structures require actions, commitments, promises, or sacrifices for assurance of one’s communion with a deity or leader. Christianity, instead, says believers must simply trust in Christ’s complete work on the cross for salvation.
This concept seems simple, but you must understand that before Christianity arrived on the Roman block, hundreds of religions preceded it. These religious structures demanded absolute obedience. Submission and relationship to their deities were only attainable through priests. Sacrifices for forgiveness required an earthly mediator. Acts of religious service were performed in return for abundant crops, fertile women, and healthy livestock. Without sacrifices, the gods would pelt their communities with plague, war, famine, drought, and higher infant mortality rates, so they thought. A subsistence of transactional faith was the game of the age, for thousands upon thousands of years before Jesus walked through Palestine, challenging everyone to give up their angst and trust him with their lives. No goats, no bulls, no pigeons, and definitely no human sacrifices required to attain this emancipatory agency to speak with God face to face, offered by the lowly Galilean rabbi.
Christ turned the concept of sacrifices for favors on its head, instituting a new and lasting way of faith relations between humanity and its Creator.
Trust. Trust was the name of the game. Anyone who added to this new methodology of deliverance perverted the movement and its concept, relegating the faith back to its ancient modes of give and take, ad nauseam.
Christianity had become something altogether new. Radical and foolish reliance on the complete work of an incarnate God.
As pressingly beautiful as this sounds, to many, especially those who benefit from oppressing religious people through military terror, agrarian exploitation, ignorance, and spiritual control, Jesus’ way of life was not good enough. There was no money to be made from promoting Jesus.
Fast forward to the 20th and 21st centuries, where you find Christians, not Roman or Greek philosophers and Jewish rabbis, promoting a works-based faith that weighs believers down with waves of spiritual angst over the assurance of their faith and salvation in Christ Jesus.
Propaedeutic of Fundamentalism
Enter stage right, the Fundamentalists.
Historian George Marsden wrote a robust understanding of fundamentalists:
“My own unscientific shorthand for this broader usage is that a fundamentalist (or a fundamentalistic evangelical) is ‘an evangelical who is angry about something.’ By this standard, it should be carefully noted, the operational distinction between simply being an evangelical and being what I am calling a fundamentalistic evangelical involves their relative degrees of militancy in support of conservative doctrinal, ecclesiastical, and/or cultural issues. ‘Evangelical’ is broadly defined to include those in traditions that emphasize the Bible as the highest religious authority, the necessity of being ‘born again’ or regenerated through the atoning work of Christ on the cross, pietistic devotions and morals, and the necessity of sharing the Gospel through evangelism and missions. Because the terms are used in so many different ways, however, it is nearly impossible to get a clear reading on the size of these groups, although there is no doubt that they have become a significant factor in American politics.” – George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture.
Inherently, living a pious life, devoting oneself to good morals, and disseminating the gospel through missional work are tantamount aspects of the Christian faith. We would not have Christianity in the world, as spread out as it is, today, without millions of Christians working together for thousands of years to spread the word. The difference is the militancy for “correctness” and “certainty” and public antagonism toward modernity, which catches and trips many Christian evangelicals into fundamentalist traps of cyclical spiritual angst.
“A movement is fundamentalist if and only if (i) it is reactionary towards modern developments, (ii) it is itself modern, and (iii) it is based on a grand historical narrative. More specifically, a movement is fundamentalist if it exemplifies a large number of the following properties: (i) it is reactionary in its rejection of liberal ethics, science, or technological exploitation, (ii) it is modern in seeking certainty and control, embracing literalism and infallibility about particular scriptures, actively using media and technology, or making universal claims, and (iii) it presents a grand historical narrative in terms of paradise, fall, and redemption, or cosmic dualism.” Rik Peels, On Defining Fundamentalism, Religious Studies
Fundamentalist Christians often parrot the purity of their “old-time religion” because they like to trace their method of doing “faith” all the way back to that of the Apostles. What they fail to understand, or perhaps what they refuse to admit, is that fundamentalism as a way of thinking about Christianity is a rather recent cultural phenomenon steeped in anti-intellectual, race essentialist, Western-centric, North American cultural norms. Much of what we understand as fundamentalism in the world evolved in the United States (Europe, first) and spread to the Global South.
Fundamentalists defined themselves best as antagonists. They revealed their friendships by clearly stating who they opposed. As scientific methods advanced, Protestant Christians faced internal and external pressures on their hermeneutics of scripture and social malaise regarding racial issues. Instead of responding academically to these challenges, fundamentalists embraced anti-intellectual invective as a survival mechanism. They ignored science and despised progressive social norms. They turned a blind eye to what anthropologists discovered about humans, bodies, societies, and sex.
What fundamentalists thought they would accomplish was a mode of belief about Christianity that provided certainty in all cases and causes about the world. Whites and blacks were to remain separate in the church and culture. Christians were to retain cultural and political dominance, determining what children would learn in schools through the lens of their interpretation of biblical texts. And, when it came to the law, it was grace for Christians and Mosaic legalism for non-Christians or Christians of a darker complexion. Science and academic work could only be accepted and shared if they fit into the limited and defeated interpretation of the world, as fundamentalists saw it. Creation? Seven literal days. Noah’s flood? Global. Sparing the rod from your children? Never. Spank them until they faint if necessary, to save them from their sinful nature. Spank them to save them from hell.
Everything about the Bible was literal. And if any idea, movement, intellectual, or modernist stepped up to the religious plate to challenge this corrosive hermeneutic, well, that person and their respective allegiances would be anathema.
In fact, fundamentalism rests on the idea that certainty in respect to how one interprets the Bible is singular and sacred. Meaning, attempting to view the Books of Genesis, Job, and Jonah as mytho-historic narratives that tell deeper stories about the lives of ancient Hebrews in their relationship with God and their neighbors, is perceived as heretical and demonic.
Fundamentalists reject evidence that challenges their established views: ignoring archaeological findings on humanity’s age, denying the theory of evolution, and dismissing Mesopotamian creation or flood narratives as fabrications or copies of the Pentateuch. These extra-biblical stories predate the biblical narratives we have in hand today.
There is no amount of evidence one can produce that will change the mind of the fundamentalist to a place where they will challenge their assumptions and open themselves up to dialogue. They refuse the notion that there are various modes of biblical hermeneutics.
A fundamentalist is trapped by his or her sense of certainty, even when they are wrong.
“I’ve learned to accept this paradox: a holy book that more often than not doesn’t act very much like you’d expect it, but more like a book written two thousand to three thousand years ago would act. I expect the Bible to reflect fully the ancient settings in which it was written, and therefore not act as a script that can simply be dropped into our lives without a lot of thought and wisdom. The Bible must be thought through, pondered, tried out, assessed, and (if need be) argued with—all of which is an expression of faith, not evidence to the contrary.” – Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our “Correct” Beliefs.
If fundamentalists had the chance to be irrevocably right about one thing, it should have been their unrelenting willingness to trust Jesus even when their interpretations of the faith did not adhere to modern understandings of the world.
Whereas faith in Jesus was substituted with faith in the movement that interprets the words, ways, and whims of Jesus, fundamentalists miss out on the reassurance of salvation by faith through grace alone.
Whenever this concept is bastardized or perverted, as I said above, it reduces Christianity to yet another performative religious system where fundamentalist adherents MUST behave in certain ways, perform certain tasks, find and identify certain enemies, and in this soup of a concept of faith, find joy in their salvation in Jesus.
Mimicry is the Devil’s Fashion Statement
Fundamentalism is what happens when fear becomes a substitute for faith. It warps a person’s spiritual reliance on God by making them perpetual slaves to conduct, dress, styles, and modes of external appearance and performance.
Religious people who find themselves in this category of intellectual paralysis are often prone to promote hate and harm as forms of love and progress. They stand against science, gay people, Black people, immigration, equitable economics, and the Global South. They pride themselves on rigid family structures and hierarchies where men are God-blessed leaders by genetic disposition and women are God-ordained servants and child-bearers by genetic disposition. Progress and change are destructive concepts because tradition supersedes modern understandings on any issue. To think differently about a matter is to think against the ways of God. Children are told to mimic and mirror their parents, who mirror their religious leaders, who mimic and mirror other smaller groups of religious leaders. Analytical or critical thinking is considered antithetical to the movement and academia, akin to devilish indoctrination. And yes, the concept of indoctrination is only utilized as such for outsiders and academics. Indoctrination never happens within.
Fundamentalists live in perpetual fear of social ostracism. Fear of committing mortal sins. Fear of being found as anything other than the mold they were taught to fit into.
It is not Christianity in practice, just in name. Because when one is asked to cast aside all facets of one’s epistemological foundations, which are quite limited within the movement, these pious people resort to what they do best: dig in and dig deep. Don’t budge. Don’t move. Don’t ask. Don’t think. Don’t do anything.
Fundamentalists are extremely populist. They follow the loudest leader, whose charisma oozes biblical certainty. Their political stance has historically been conservative, and as of late, in the United States of America, it has been Republican. They cannot and refuse to believe that progressive or liberal Christians exist. They condemn anyone who falls outside of their circle of friends who come together for no other reason than to better define their enemies.
They refuse to participate in social movements (Civil Rights, for example) because to do anything as a religious individual other than preach the gospel is considered a heresy. A Christian who uses their voice on the pulpit or the public square for the natural benefit of their neighbor through political and activist movements is not a Christian but an agitator attempting to bring strife and schism into the body of Christ. They refuse to engage in political activism unless that activism benefits them as the homogeneous and hegemonic foundational group in society. They seldom lose power before they act, as their populist leader utilizes fear and misinformation to guide them into a place where they believe they have lost influence over the current culture. The truth is, they perceive their lack of influence or the abundance of diversity of thought as persecution and an affront to their religious liberties.
Fundamentalists are the only ones allowed religious liberty.
Fundamentalist Christianity is antithetical to a Jesus who asks that we seek him in grace and in knowledge. Knowledge, as we know, can be found within the Bible and outside of it. But for fundamentalists, truth, absolute truth, is relegated to a singular and limited, often outdated, and heavily influenced by a white, male, misogynist, North American capitalist, conservative, literal version of Biblical interpretation and worldview.
There is nothing but angst here. Anxiety mixed with hyper-performance on the outside and depression mixed with crippling spiritual ineffectiveness inside. This movement is very active, not in spreading the liberative message of Jesus but in making disciples of the devil.
The devil wants nothing more than to industrialize a religious system that mimics Christianity but enslaves its adherents to methods and practices that make people feel good once they’ve accomplished them and miserable if they fail to do so.
Fear and resentment abound in fundamentalist gathering places. Grace is a mere word, not an active agency of redemption. Faith is a concept, not evidence of things unseen. Christ’s work on earth, once complete through the cross and resurrection, to them, is complete inasmuch as you sustain and promote their concepts of acceptable ecclesiological and cultural norms.
Fundamentalism is more about a reaction to progress and change than it is about Jesus. They utilize Jesus as a fly trap for weary and anxious souls who fear the unknown tomorrow. And instead of providing a stable faith where one can rely on Jesus when all else falters or changes, they force people to adapt to cultural norms and traditions that mimic faith but are, in fact, secular nationalist rituals made sacred to pass the time and provide existential meaning to anxious souls.
Anxious Piety
Fundamentalists are anxious. Their piety is performative. Their love is filled with hate. And their knowledge is rehearsed. They memorize the Bible, not because they love the Words of God, but because they want to bash people over the head with the fact that they’ve memorized the Bible.
There is no Christ here. There is a god here, but it isn’t Yahweh. It is the god of false certainty. An idol. A crippling one that damages one’s ability to think freely and seek God humbly, in freedom. Free of fear of death. Free from rigid dogmatism that cares little for truth and much for being the loudest voice in a room, every room, in every nation.
The next time you’re faced with a fundamentalist evangelical, understand you are interacting with a person who has a limited, if not altogether bastardized, view of reality. They do not view the world the way non-fundamentalists do. They view the world through a kaleidoscope of terror, bloodshed, death, and persecution. The beauty of progress and human potential is nonexistent for them. Any attempt to better the world for all of its inhabitants is seen as futile because the fundamentalist believes he or she will see the world vaporized into smithereens in their lifetime. They believe all efforts for human enrichment, in light of the Second Advent of Jesus, are pointless.
So long as they are in religious and political power, they care very little for the oppressed of whom Jesus came to save and deliver. They care, however, that you adapt to their structures of fear and angst.
I know all of this, perhaps, regrettably, all too well, because I was a fundamentalist. Perhaps the most dogmatic, anti-intellectual disciple of Christian fundamentalism in my respective circles.
I praise God for delivering me from this dualistic cult that presents itself as Christian. I felt nothing but angst there, although I knew all of the scriptures of redemption by heart. I knew them the way someone knows their way around their home. How do they know where the cutlery sits, where the cups stand, and where the plates lie? Where the laundry detergent goes and where the dishwasher soap sits. I knew more about the Bible than perhaps ancient scholars, and still, this movement robbed me of that beautiful salvific assurance I was promised in Christ Jesus. I worshipped certainty, not Jesus.
I now know my faith rests securely in the hands of Jesus, whereas then, I professed this but lived the opposite. As every fundamentalist does.
Pray for them. Pray for me. The temptation to be right, certain, and absolute in an ever-changing world is ever-present.
“When we reach the point where things simply make no sense, when our thinking about God and life no longer line up, when any sense of certainty is gone, and when we can find no reason to trust God but we still do, well that is what trust looks like at its brightest – when all else is dark.” – Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our “Correct” Beliefs.
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
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