An insider’s account of fundamentalist Christianity

What..an amazing article.

Sure..it can be a bit insulting to the "bigots" but that's fine. They're existence insults me.

 

That really was amazing. I don't agree with his stance on God, but it was a powerful message on the true horrors of hate.

 

And people still want to vote for Angle, Palin, Miller, O'Donnell, Paladino, and james meeks?

All of the above espouse fundementalist christanity as core elements of their politics.

 

Well, O'Donnell has already said she is not a witch.

Has Hillary Clinton denied her status yet?

Just curious.

And by the way...Christianity, or God, has not played any part in modern politics...I think the other fella has his hands in it a little more

 

There is so much bull shit in that statement by itself that I can't even think of a place to begin with.

 

Oh lighten up...I thought it was funny.

 

It was funny. But I am just saying it's bull shit. ^-^; Didn't mean to make it seem like I was attacking you

 

I didn't take it as such.
No worries my friend.

 

when someone says that rape is gods plan, and is a christian, speaking in relation to the politics over abortion, you can assume that it is something bringing their christian views into their politics.

christanity is constantly being interjected into politics by people who are advocating laws based on the bible. it is fairly common, expecially the further right you go.

one of the biggest reasons why gays are still being used as political threats by some on the right is because they can get the religious conservatives whipped up into a homophobic fantasia, based around their religious beliefs.

in factions of the political system in america, you cannot differentiat between ones religion, and ones politics.

 

Well...it would seem that some of our laws do come from the bible...or at least Biblical teachings.

The whole not murdering thing I think came from that wacky 10 Commandments thing....I knew Jesus was a cool dude when I read he could turn water into wine (I wish I had that power...only I wish I could turn water into Grey Goose...it would save me a bundle of money)

 

Because before the 10 Commandments people didn't mind murder? o0

 

Anybody want to try and figure out what church the blogger was talking about? Given some of the details (Anita Bryant, early days of the the Moral Majority), it had to have been the late 1970s when all of this went down. Were there any other huge fundamentalist churches with associated school and seminary in that era other than Thomas Road Baptist Church (aka Jerry Falwell's empire)? I wish the guy would give more detail because while I've come across things that hint at the racial politics that went into the founding of the Moral Majority, they've done a good job of whitewashing the history of the rise of the religious right, and if there are people with stories to tell it needs to get out there.

That said, assuming my guess is correct about where and when the guy's story took place, a lot of what he wrote about doesn't so much represent fundamentalist Christianity as it does the paranoid John Bircher stuff mixing with southern racism. I grew up around fundamentalism and have all sorts of problems with it on all sorts of levels, but most of what the author described isn't a representative picture of what I saw in the late '80s and the '90s, and it's not even terribly representative of what Frank Schaeffer, who was one of the movement leaders and has since repudiated it described (and he has nothing good to say about the religious right).

 

I think everyone in power does a job of whitewashing their history.

 

I do disagree with this article to an extent....at least the title

I kinda put religion in a few categories:
1)people like me who are Christian, but who drink liquor as soon as we get home from church.

2)Evangelicals/Fundamentalist: They can get a little excited at times, but most are really harmless



3) Radicals: The crazies that twist the word of God to suit their own twisted agenda .

Fundamentalists and evangelicals wouldn't be leading kids to a klan rally or a meeting of the local chapter of the Hitler Youth. But Radicals would.

It just like with the Muslims. Even those that strictly follow the teachings of Islam don't go around blowing shit up...but the radicals who twist the religion for their own purposes do.

I guess you could say that I kinda grew up in a fundamentalist church, and I never saw any of this crazy stuff....there was no bigotry or hatred. Granted they thought gays souls were in peril, but they harbored no ill-will towards them....they were actually concerned about them.

Like those idiots that protest military funerals, you can twist The Scriptures if you set your mind to it. The people that do that...be it Christian or whatever religion...to recruit young impressionable minds...well i think that is shitty. I would suggest people like that need to move to Miami, because it seems they need to start getting used to warm temperatures.

 

If I'm correct in my guess and the author of that article is talking about Thomas Road Baptist Church, the story is relevant because it adds credence to the claims I've read about the rise of the religious right as a political force having far more to do with racial politics and the whole Bob Jones University tax exemption fight than anybody is now willing to admit. It's also relevant because it adds an additional level of understanding to guys like Tony Perkins, who was a student and what is now Liberty University back in the late '70s.

It's not a particularly accurate picture of American Christian fundamentalism NOW though, and was probably never an accurate picture of anything outside of the South.

Today, I wouldn't worry about the old school fundamentalists, they're strict and legalistic in many ways and I've tossed out a lot of the stuff I heard from fundamentalists in my childhood, but they're well meaning and mostly harmless. The people to worry about are the Theonomists (aka Christian Reconstructionists or Dominionists). They dress normally, blend in with society, drink alcohol, and if you talk to them they'll sound quite reasonable and almost post-modernist. Then you find out that they believe that Old Testament Civil Law is still in effect today, and that they want to implement it through democratic means. The more moderate among them just want to throw us all in jail for violating Leviticus, but there are some who think we should all be executed. Oh, and they've been gradually taking over the religious right over the last 30 years.

 

I see this argument used a lot in defense of religions, and it's very good point. You'd think more people would be able to keep this in mind considering how often it comes up. I guess prejudice tends to take a back seat to logic, even it is prejudice against seemingly prejudced people.

Yeah, I was raised in a Catholic Church myself and it was more or less the same thing. There were protests and things sometimes (the big issue then in my church was abortion), but it was realoly just carrying signs on the side of the road. Mostly they talked about living a good life and using your heart to listen to god. They avoided most of the more controversial issues. Maybe that's why I have a more hopeful view of religion than most people around here seem to. I went to a good church with good people who tried to teach a more gentle, loving doctrine.

I do have issues with organized religion though. For one thing, I am naturally a questioning, doubtful person, and that's not likely to change. Doesn't really go well with a religious setting.

My other issue is the fact that in most churches I've seen, people seem to forget the point of even going to church. It's like they do it because they are supposed to, and they follow along with the community because it's supposed to be what god wants, but it's like for 90% of them it's just superficial. They don't seem to get the point of it all. (I'd go into what I think the point is, but that would be a huge essay.)

I think most of the more normal, non-crazy religious people would agree with you there. Most of them don't seem to appreciate these kinds of hateful people either. The extremeists also serve to give them a bad name and cause them problems as well.

 

The only issue in bamaboys explorations of the levels is that fundementalisem and radical is a very subtle line. A key element of fundementalist religion of any kind is its forcefully intrusive nature into the realms of other people's lives. you can be evengelical without being fundementalist. evengelicals tend to have a very pronounced, and unmoving opinion of religion, but fundementalisem, be it fundementalist ultra orthadox judisem, fundementalist christianity, or fundementalist islam, all tend to exert control over the lives of others, both inside and outside the faith... which is why fundementalist islam has likely killed more muslims in its history than anyone else.

fundementalisem and radicalisem really are not different groups... at least in the most common of religious philosphoical systems.

 

The other thing that has to be taken into account when talking about Christian fundamentalism in America in particular is that the term "fundamentalism" has taken on different meanings throughout American religious history from the 1930s on forward. Originally, it referred to one side in what's known as the "Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy" that went on at Princeton seminary from the teens to the late 1920s over the inerrancy of scripture and a number of other issues, and which resulted in the theologian J. Gresham Machen leaving Princeton and founding Westminster Theological Seminary. It was an academic theological debate between learned people who aren't much like what we'd think of today when we think of fundamentalism.

Because of the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy, a lot of churches started to label themselves as "fundamentalist" to distinguish between themselves and churches with a modernist theology, and most of those churches already had crazy strict legalistic rules about what you could and couldn't do. Because of that, fundamentalism as a theological position became conflated in everybody's minds with the legalistic rules to the point where there's not really any distinction.

In response to the overall social upheaval of the 1960s, in the 1970s the majority of fundamentalist churches became even more isolated from broader society as they battened down the hatches to protect themselves from what was perceived as external threats from "the world", but a small percentage of fundamentalists became radicalized and developed this idea of ushering in the Kingdom of God through political strategies on earth (these are the Moral Majority/Christian Coalition/American Family association types), and while they see themselves as the heirs of the original fundamentalists, they're actually incredibly new and radical. It's what makes it difficult to talk about American Christian fundamentalism because some people think of those stuffy churches with rules about drinking and smoking and dancing (which is strict, but well meaning and mostly harmless), while others think of the movement activist religious right, which isn't harmless at all.

That new breed of fundamentalists, whether in Christianity or Islam, claims to represent the old time, historic version of their religion, but they don't and never had. They're both reactionary movements lashing out at a world that they cannot control and no longer understand.

And that's my tl;dr version of the story of fundamentalism in American religious history.