CUNY Seminar Counters "Christian Jihad"

Left-wing intellectuals will conduct a major academic conference at the City University of New York (CUNY) April 29-30 titled "Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right." The event is co-sponsored by tax-supported CUNY and the New York Open Center.

Skipp Porteous, a former Pentecostal minister, is scheduled to lecture on the "Christian Jihad." He has written online: "Have I rejected God? No. Man created God in his own image. I reject that image."

Other lectures listed include, "Religion and Secrecy in the Bush Administration," "On the Psychology and Theocracy of George W. Bush: Reflections in a Culture of Fear," and "Fundamentalism: The Fear and the Rage."

The labeling of people as "fundamentalists" fulfills a basic drive in humans: the need for a tangible, flesh-and-bone enemy. If a real one can't be found for the cause, they can be made up. The image of the fundamentalist meets everything a modern American liberal needs: violent, mindless, dangerous, a threat, the enemy. The fundamentalist challenges "reproductive rights"; he subscribes to a backward creed. He is anti-progressive (and we all know that progress is the only god worth bowing the knee to!). And he is not easily pinned down: fundamentalist can mean, or will eventually mean, any Christian deemed threatening: that is, commited to his faith and to his faith's morality and truth claims. A zealous Catholic could be a "fundamentalist"; a staunch Presbyterian could clearly be threatening if he stands by his claims of truth.

This labeling of enemies has many precedents, of course. The Jews were a convient bogey-man for the Nazis. In the Soviet Union during collectivization a class enemy was invented among the peasants: the kulaks, the richer peasants. The peasants themselves had no conception of such a class, but the Communists realized the need for an enemy to fight against, so one was suitably invented, and demonized. He was then "liquidated" (propensity for euphenism is also a human trait of some antiquity). The kulak- and one could be a kulak for owning a cow or a tin roof on a dirt-floored hut- was anti-progressive, an impediment to the grand society developing at the Communist's hands. Duly labeled as dangerous he could be duly eliminated.

I doubt whether anyone in America is floating pogroms for "fundamentalists," but the mentality is in some ways frightfully similar. If it is carried through to its furthest end, it can mean the callous reduction of the hated enemy's humanity. He becomes merely an unhuman, formless oponenent.

Fundamentalists themselves have not been guiltless in enemy-forming, of course. One need only read Jack Chick tracks to gauge this. But their enemy-forming is not nearly so disturbing. I do not think most fundamentalists- any I have ever met anyway- would consider anything beyond trying to win souls. And this is because fundamentalists (and I mean by this the narrow meaning of certain sorts of Protestants, particularly of the Baptist tradition) understand something that I suspect that many liberals would not like to admit: that the enemy is very much us. I too am a sinner. All fundamentalists confess this, and most believe it earnestly. It makes all the difference.

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