Fundamentalism vs. Orthodoxy

A good many people I've known who object to Christianity do so because the only Christianity they've ever encountered is a kind especially partucular to the Bible Belts states: a harsh, literalist, legalist strain of evangelical protestantism based upon puritan ideas and doctrines filtered through the emotional/spiritual/antirational atmosphere of Great Awakening camp-meetings. In other words, they think protestant fundamentalism ? the world of Jack Chick tracts, TV preachers, and book-burnings ? is baseline Christianity.

The kind of Christianity I describe above -- which I'll call "fundamentalism" for the sake of argument ? is not mainstream, traditional Christianity. It is a homegrown product, made in the USA c. A.D. 1850, not in Judea c. A.D. 33. It is Christianity ? those portions of it that hold to the beliefs expressed in the Creeds, anyway ? but it's a spinter of a splinter of a splinter of the great splintering started by Martin Luther in the early 16th Century. Fundamentalism is to Christianity what the Taliban is to Islam ? an ideological cult adorned in the trappings of true religion.

The Fundamentalist movement, which didn't really get going until just before world war I, started on the right track: it was created to rally Christians back to the five (later 6) fundamentals of the Faith: 1)The inspiration and what the writers call infallibility of Scripture, (2) the deity of Christ (including his virgin birth), (3) the substitutionary atonement of his death, (4) his literal resurrection from the dead, (5) his literal return at the Second Coming, and (6) the Virginity of Mary. The movement was a response to the increasing doctrinal liberalization of the so-called "mainstream" Protestant denominations . This turned out to be a wise move; today, the manstream Protestant denoms have "liberalized" themselves almost out of existence, while the fundamentalist denoms are packing them in every Sunday.

Unfortunately, things went sour right away. The core Fundamentalist belief is that the Bible (especially the King James Version, or KJV), read literally in English, is the sole authority on faith and morals. Further, Fundamentalists believe that each believer is individually inspired by the Holy Spirit to interpret the meaning of Scripture. This had predictable results: as with all Protestant movements, the tendency towards non-compatible individual interpretation splintered the Fundamentalists into a zillion bickering fragments, each reading the same Bible, each in posession of the one, true intepretation. With no Pope or teaching Magisterium to define the doctrine and teachings of the Church, these new denominations further splintered as the years went by ? leaving the mess we have today.

The second core Fundamentalist belief "is their insistence on a faith in Christ as one’s personal Lord and Savior. 'Do you accept Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?' they ask. 'Have you been saved?"' This is unmodified Christian individualism, which holds that the individual is saved, without ever considering his relationship to a church, a congregation, or anyone else. It is a one-to-one relationship, with no community, no sacraments, just the individual Christian and his Lord. And the Christian knows when he has been saved, down to the hour and minute of his salvation, because his salvation came when he 'accepted' Christ. It came like a flash. In that instant, many Fundamentalists believe, their salvation is assured. There is now nothing that can undo it. Without that instant, that moment of acceptance, a person would be doomed to eternal hell." [Source]

But this once-saved-always-saved doctrine, this atomistic, individualist brand of American do-it-yerself salvation, has nothing to do with the historic Christian faith, which has always taught that Christians are members of the Body of Christ. Christianity is a collective faith, not an individualist faith. Further, the Chruch has always taught (and simple common sense confirms) that salvation is a process, not a single instant . People who begin to believe in Christ do not magically turn into lily-white saints the minute they pray the Sinner's Prayer; on the contrary, it is possible to lose one's salvation as well as gain it.

The third most visible characteristic of Fundamentalism "is the emphasis on evangelism. If sinners do not undergo the same kind of salvation experience Fundamentalists have undergone, they will go to hell. Fundamentalists perceive a duty to spread their faith—what can be more charitable than to give others a chance for escaping hell?—and they often have been successful." [Ibid.] This is well and good, and even admirable but is it effective? Traditional Christianity says "no". Preaching is a vital part of spreading the Good News, to be sure, but living the Christian faith has always been a more effective method of evangelism than merely talking about it.

Furthermore, when most people who dislike Christianity are asked why, a good many might respond that its emphasis on legalism strict, specific lists of Dos and Don'ts is what turns them off the most. Again, while holy living is the mandate for every Christian, "there are perhaps no Christians who operate in a more regimented manner" than do the Fundamentalists.
"Their rules—non-biblical rules, one might add—extend not just to religion and religious practices proper, but to facets of everyday life. Most people are familiar with their strictures on drinking, gambling, dancing, and smoking. Fundamentalists also are intensely involved in their local congregations. Many people returning to the Catholic Church from Fundamentalism complain that as Fundamentalists they had no time or room for themselves; everything centered around the church. All their friends were members; all their social activities were staged by it. Not to attend Wednesday evening services (in addition to one or two services on Sunday), not to participate in the Bible studies and youth groups, not to dress and act like everyone else in the congregation—these immediately put one beyond the pale; and in a small church (few Fundamentalist churches have more than a hundred members) this meant being ostracized, a silent invitation to conform or to worship elsewhere." [Ibid.] The truth is that most of the rules that make Fundamentalism such a harsh-seeming, uncompromising way of life have nothing to do with the traditional Christian faith. They are hard rules for a hard religion, a religion for hard people, born from the pain of hard living and hard times.

The problem is that people tend to confuse fundamentalism and orthodoxy. They are two different things. The orthodox Chistian faith is based on immutable and fundamental beliefs, yes, but the Church that rests on that base is a living Body, not a dead work of laws carved in stone. It is vital that Christians live holy lives, of course, and the Fundamentalists are to be commended on their emphasis on personal holiness; however, Fundamentalism fails to emphasize the equally important doctrine of forgiveness. All to often, the pious Fundamentalist will set him- or herself up as the standard by which all other Christians are to be measured the familiar self-righteous, holier-than-thou hypocrite that most people associate with "godnazi" or "bible banger" stereotypes. This sort of thing is a common failing of those with weak self-esteem, but self-righteous Pharisaism is a sin (Pride), and furthermore a scandal (also a deadly sin) in that it deflects people from discovering the Truth. The duty of the Christian is not to point to himself or herself as an example of holiness, but to point to the One Man and His mother who alone can claim to be holy.

Many fundamentalist churches also turn into cults of personality based around the pastor. They are partcularly susceptible to this because they are centered on the idea that the literal reading of the English translation of the Holy Writ is the only guide to faith and morals. But the Bible is not written in plain speech of the sort the average person of 2002 uses in evryday life; the KJV version used by most Fundamentalists is in fact a book written in three different ancient tongues, translated into Greek and Latin by medieval scholars, and then beautifully retranslated into Shakespearean court English by the greatest scholars 17th-century England had to offer. That doesn't mean that the text of the Bible is erroneous or flawed; what it does mean is that the Bible is not a book to be read strictly at face value. The mistake of reading the Bible in the same offhand way one might read a Mack Bolan "The Executioner" thriller has lead to all sorts of confusion over the years. No, Scripture requires a teacher, a teacher who can be trusted to interpret the word of God in an accurate and contextual manner. The Catholic Church (and her Orthodox and Anglican sisters) have such teachers: they are called bishops, and they have two thousand years of written exegesis and teaching to fall back on. (The Catholic Church recognizes the Bishop of Rome as the supreme authority on these matters; others differ, but all agree that interpretation is a task for the learned and pious, not for amateurs.) But to the Fundamentalist every man is his own Pope, and, therefore, his own Church.

This is why there are so many different kids of Protestants out there: if you don't like Brother Goforth's take on foot-washing, just start your own church! In the end, the church with the most members, bowling alleys, and swimming pools wins! As a result of the individualist tendencies within Protestant fundamentalism, a million mini-denominations have risen up, each centered around its own "infallible" Scriptural interepreter the pastor, minister, or "worship leader" who runs "his" church with a level of control a feudal lord might envy. This can lead to a truly scary kind of situation, a situation where a man can lose sight of the perfect Man and instead turn to using his power for his own lusts and cravings and, men being what they are , that can be a pretty ugly situation indeed. This is the Elmer Gantry sterotype, the typical TV preacher tabloid story : a sham religion, the result of empire-building by an ambitious, charismatic man, making a mint by selling his own brand of salvation. If that's all there was to Christianity, I'd hate it too.

The final distinguishing mark of modern American fundamentalism is pure, wooden-headed, willful ignorance the refusal to look at and acknowledge things as they are, especially when those things conflict with Brother Goforth's literal reading of the King James Bible. A peculiar kind of antirationalism runs through much of fundamentalism , a hatred of "uppity people", of people who ask too many questions (or awkward questions), a disdain for "book-learnin'", formal education, or imaginative entertainments such as comic books, science fiction, or anime. This sort of thing is disappearing as Americans become more urbanized and gain better access to education, but it's still out there, and it's not confined to tarpaper shacks or trailer-houses, either. Part of this bias against education has traditionally been based on the class envy of the self-styled working classes against the upper classes ("preppie snobs", "city slickers", etc.), but Fundamentalism is no longer strictly a working-class phenomenon. Instead, the modern middle-class Fundamentalist is a denizen of the suburbs, a creature often forced to work long hours (and suffer the resulting health and family problems) to support his four-car, tract-house, big-screen TV lifestyle. (Please note that I am not opposed to suburban tract houses, big-screen TVs, or private car ownership as such; I'm opposed to the sort of inhuman work-sleep-work routine often needed to support such a lifestyle.) Exhausted by job, kids, and chores, the spiritual suburnanite often seeks solace from the grind of working life in a "simple" faith, a faith that doesn't require any study or reasoning or effort, just a quick Sinner's Prayer, a couple hours of happy-clappy "celebration worship" per week, and the occasional fishing-camp/ski-lodge "retreat" -- a "fundamental" faith, shorn of all that boring Latin, with amplified sing-along pop music instead of those gay organ songs and a young, good-lookin' preacher (or, increasingly, a "preacherette") to tell you how you can do whatever you want (except buy wine in Arlington, Texas, of course) and still go to Heaven. "Is God Awesome Or What?"

That's not the orthodox Christian faith. Real Christianity is based on a few simple historical facts the Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Life, Ministry, Crucifixion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ but it is by no means a simple faith. It is complex, because life is complex and human beings are complex. It is simple enough in essence for a child to understand "Jesus loves me, this I know" but, being Truth, is also a complex integration and synthesis of the lesser truths Man has come to know, from the wisdom of the Greek sages to the frontiers of quantum physics. It is not a religion for idiots, having been the profession of the greatest minds of our species from St. Paul to Isaac Newton to Blaise Pascal to Karol Wojtlya, but neither is it a gnostic faith, open only to an elite of learned esoterics. It is a simple as the One God who created it and as complex as the Trinity that it worships.

So forget everything you thought you knew about the Christian faith. You don't have to take the Bible literally to be a Christian. You don't have to say the prayer in the back of the Jack Chick comic book to be saved. You don't have to suddenly become perfect to be a believer. You don't have to bang on doors to be an evangelist. Christianity has nothing to do with how rare you like your steak or how long the grape juice has been sitting out. No true Christian would ever think of him- or herself as being holier than thou or of being holy at all. You don't have to take Brother Goforth's word for anything to be a Christian, nor do you have to follow his pronouncements as if he were the successor of St. Peter and if you see him on TV, change the channel. And most important of all you don't have to turn your mind off to be a Christian. All you have to do is die die to yourself, believe that Jesus Christ died, rose from the dead and is God, and surrender your own will and desires and soul to Him. It's painful and frightening, but only in the same way that any birth is a painful and frightening experience; but only after one is born can new life begin.

Christianity is a thinking man's faith and a believing man's faith, an innocent child's faith and a wise old man's faith. It is the one true Faith so don't reject it on the basis of what you think you know about it. Seek the truth. Learn all you can about the true, historic, orthodox Christian faith; mull it all over in your mind; then, when you sense the time is right, compose your thoughts and address yourself to God in personal terms, as child to father.

He will answer, in His own way and time and that is the fundamental truth upon which all depends.

Corrected for typos:

A good many people I've known who object to Christianity do so because the only Christianity they've ever encountered is a kind especially partucular to the Bible Belts states: a harsh, literalist, legalist strain of evangelical protestantism based upon puritan ideas and doctrines filtered through the emotional/spiritual/antirational atmosphere of Great Awakening camp-meetings. In other words, they think protestant fundamentalism the world of Jack Chick tracts, TV preachers, and book-burnings -- is baseline Christianity.

But it isn't.

The kind of Christianity I describe above -- which I'll call "fundamentalism" for the sake of argument -- is not mainstream, traditional Christianity. It is a homegrown product, made in the USA c. A.D. 1850, not in Judea c. A.D. 33. It is Christianity ? those portions of it that hold to the beliefs expressed in the Creeds, anyway -- but it's a spinter of a splinter of a splinter of the great splintering started by Martin Luther in the early 16th Century. Fundamentalism is to Christianity what the Taliban is to Islam: an ideological cult adorned in the trappings of true religion.

The Fundamentalist movement, which didn't really get going until just before World War I, started on the right track: it was created to rally Christians back to the five (later 6) fundamentals of the Faith: 1)The inspiration/infallibility of Scripture, (2) the deity of Christ (including his virgin birth), (3) the substitutionary atonement of his death, (4) his literal resurrection from the dead, (5) his literal return at the Second Coming, and (6) the Virginity of Mary. The movement was a response to the increasing doctrinal liberalization of the so-called "mainstream" Protestant denominations . This turned out to be a wise move; today, the manstream Protestant denoms have "liberalized" themselves almost out of existence, while the fundamentalist denoms are packing them in every Sunday.

Unfortunately, things went sour right away. The core Fundamentalist belief is that the Bible (especially the King James Version, or KJV), read literally in English, is the sole authority on faith and morals. Further, Fundamentalists believe that each believer is individually inspired by the Holy Spirit to interpret the meaning of Scripture. This had predictable results: as with all Protestant movements, the tendency towards non-compatible individual interpretation splintered the Fundamentalists into a zillion bickering fragments, each reading the same Bible, each in possession of the one, true intepretation. With no Pope or teaching Magisterium to define the doctrine and teachings of the Church, these new denominations further splintered as the years went by, leaving the mess we have today.

But this once-saved-always-saved doctrine, this atomistic, individualist brand of American do-it-yerself salvation, has nothing to do with the historic Christian faith, which has always taught that Christians are members of the Body of Christ. Christianity is a collective faith, not an individualist faith. Further, the Chruch has always taught (and simple common sense confirms) that salvation is a process, not an instantaneous event . People who begin to believe in Christ do not magically turn into lily-white saints the minute they pray the Sinner's Prayer; on the contrary, it is possible to lose one's salvation as well as gain it.

The third most visible characteristic of Fundamentalism "is the emphasis on evangelism. If sinners do not undergo the same kind of salvation experience Fundamentalists have undergone, they will go to hell. Fundamentalists perceive a duty to spread their faith—what can be more charitable than to give others a chance for escaping hell?—and they often have been successful." [Ibid.] This is well and good, and even admirable -- but is it effective? Traditional Christianity says "no". Preaching is a vital part of spreading the Good News, to be sure, but living the Christian faith has always been a more effective method of evangelism than merely talking about it.

Furthermore, when most people who dislike Christianity are asked why, a good many might respond that its emphasis on legalism -- strict, specific lists of Dos and Don'ts -- is what turns them off the most. Again, while holy living is the mandate for every Christian, "there are perhaps no Christians who operate in a more regimented manner" than do the Fundamentalists.
"Their rules—non-biblical rules, one might add—extend not just to religion and religious practices proper, but to facets of everyday life. Most people are familiar with their strictures on drinking, gambling, dancing, and smoking. Fundamentalists also are intensely involved in their local congregations. Many people returning to the Catholic Church from Fundamentalism complain that as Fundamentalists they had no time or room for themselves; everything centered around the church. All their friends were members; all their social activities were staged by it. Not to attend Wednesday evening services (in addition to one or two services on Sunday), not to participate in the Bible studies and youth groups, not to dress and act like everyone else in the congregation—these immediately put one beyond the pale; and in a small church (few Fundamentalist churches have more than a hundred members) this meant being ostracized, a silent invitation to conform or to worship elsewhere." [Ibid.] The truth is that most of the rules that make Fundamentalism such a harsh-seeming, uncompromising way of life have nothing to do with the traditional Christian faith. They are hard rules for a hard religion, a religion for hard people, born from the pain of hard living and hard times.

The problem is that people tend to confuse fundamentalism and orthodoxy. They are two different things. The orthodox Chistian faith is based on immutable and fundamental beliefs, yes, but the Church that rests on that base is a living Body, not a dead work of laws carved in stone. It is vital that Christians live holy lives, of course, and the Fundamentalists are to be commended on their emphasis on personal holiness; however, Fundamentalism fails to emphasize the equally important doctrine of forgiveness. All to often, the pious Fundamentalist will set him- or herself up as the standard by which all other Christians are to be measured -- the familiar self-righteous, holier-than-thou hypocrite that most people associate with "godnazi" or "bible banger" stereotypes. This sort of thing is a common failing of those with weak self-esteem, but self-righteous Pharisaism is a sin (Pride), and furthermore a scandal (also a deadly sin) in that it deflects people from discovering the Truth. The duty of the Christian is not to point to himself or herself as an example of holiness, but to point to the One Man and His mother who alone can claim to be holy.

Many fundamentalist churches also turn into cults of personality based around the pastor. They are partcularly susceptible to this because they are centered on the idea that the literal reading of the English translation of the Holy Writ is the only guide to faith and morals. But the Bible is not written in plain speech of the sort the average person of 2002 uses in everyday life; the KJV version used by most Fundamentalists is in fact a book written in three different ancient tongues, translated into Greek and Latin by ancient and medieval saints, and then beautifully retranslated into Shakespearean court English by the greatest scholars 17th-century England had to offer. That doesn't mean that the text of the Bible is erroneous or flawed; what it does mean is that the Bible is not a book to be read strictly at face value. The mistake of reading the Bible in the same offhand way one might read a Mack Bolan "The Executioner" thriller has lead to all sorts of confusion over the years. No, Scripture requires a teacher, a teacher who can be trusted to interpret the word of God in an accurate and contextual manner. The Catholic Church (and her Orthodox and Anglican sisters) have such teachers: they are called bishops, and they have two thousand years of written exegesis and teaching to fall back on. (The Catholic Church recognizes the Bishop of Rome as the supreme authority on these matters; others differ, but all agree that interpretation is a task for the learned and pious, not for amateurs.) But to the Fundamentalist every man is his own Pope, and, therefore, his own Church.

This is why there are so many different kids of Protestants out there: if you don't like Brother Goforth's take on foot-washing, just start your own church! In the end, the church with the most members, bowling alleys, and swimming pools wins! As a result of the individualist tendencies within Protestant fundamentalism, a million mini-denominations have risen up, each centered around its own "infallible" Scriptural interepreter -- the pastor, minister, or "worship leader" -- who runs "his" church with a level of control a feudal lord might envy. This can lead to a truly scary kind of situation, a situation where a man can lose sight of the perfect Man and instead turn to using his power for his own lusts and cravings -- and, men being what they are , that can be a pretty ugly situation indeed. This is the Elmer Gantry sterotype, the typical TV preacher tabloid story : a sham religion, the result of empire-building by an ambitious, charismatic man, making a mint by selling his own brand of salvation. If that's all there was to Christianity, I'd hate it too.

The final distinguishing mark of modern American fundamentalism is pure, wooden-headed, willful ignorance: the refusal to look at and acknowledge things as they are, especially when those things conflict with Brother Goforth's literal reading of the King James Bible. A peculiar kind of antirationalism runs through much of fundamentalism , a hatred of "uppity people", of people who ask too many questions (or awkward questions), a disdain for "book-learnin'", formal education, or imaginative entertainments such as comic books, science fiction, or anime. This sort of thing is disappearing as Americans become more urbanized and gain better access to education, but it's still out there, and it's not confined to the tarpaper shack/trailer-house set, either. Part of this bias against education has traditionally been based on the class envy of the self-styled working classes against the upper classes ("preppie snobs", "city slickers", etc.), but Fundamentalism is no longer strictly a working-class phenomenon. Instead, the modern middle-class Fundamentalist is a denizen of the suburbs, a creature often obligated to work long hours (and suffer the resulting health and family problems) needed to support his four-car, tract-house, big-screen TV lifestyle. (Please note that I am not opposed to suburban tract houses, big-screen TVs, or private car ownership as such; I'm opposed to the sort of inhuman work-sleep-work routine often needed to support such a lifestyle.) Exhausted by job, kids, and chores, the spiritual suburbanite often seeks solace from the grind of working life in a "simple" faith, a faith that doesn't require any study or reasoning or effort, just a quick Sinner's Prayer, a couple hours of happy-clappy "celebration worship" per week, and the occasional fishing-camp/ski-lodge "retreat" -- a "fundamental" faith, shorn of all that boring Latin, with amplified sing-along pop music instead of those gay organ songs, and a young, good-lookin' preacher (or, increasingly, a "preacherette") to tell you how you can do whatever you want (except buy wine in Arlington, Texas, of course) and still go to Heaven. "Is God Awesome Or What?"

That's not the orthodox Christian faith. Real Christianity is based on a few simple historical facts -- the Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Life, Ministry, Crucifixion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ -- but it is by no means a simple faith. It is complex, because life is complex and human beings are complex. It is simple enough in essence for a child to understand -- "Jesus loves me, this I know" -- but, being Truth, is also a complex integration and synthesis of the lesser truths Man has come to know, from the wisdom of the Greek sages to the frontiers of quantum physics. It is not a religion for idiots, having been the profession of the greatest minds of our species from St. Paul to Isaac Newton to Blaise Pascal to Karol Wojtlya, but neither is it a gnostic faith, open only to an elite school of learned esoterics. It is a simple as the One God who created it , and as complex as the Trinity that it worships.

Most important of all: you don't have to turn your mind off to be a Christian. All you have to do is die -- die to yourself, believe that Jesus Christ died, rose from the dead and is God, and surrender your own will and desires and soul to Him. It's painful and frightening, but only in the same way that any birth is a painful and frightening experience; but only after one is born can new life begin.

Christianity is a thinking man's faith and a believing man's faith, an innocent child's faith and a wise old man's faith. It is the one true Faith -- so don't reject it on the basis of what you think you know about it. Seek the truth. Learn all you can about the true, historic, orthodox Christian faith; mull it all over in your mind; then, when you sense the time is right, compose your thoughts and address yourself to God in personal terms, as child to father.

He will answer, in His own way and time -- and that is the fundamental truth upon which all depends.

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