Posted on 11/09/2001 8:47:06 AM PST by The Energizer
Published 11/9/2001
Faces of fundamentalism
Most revivalists push for hope in a complex world, condemn violence
By Christine Rook
Lansing State Journal
We call them fundamentalists, these terrorists from far away, these people who have infiltrated our cities to exact some twisted religious justice.
Associated Press The Rev. Cora Duncan of Vision of Love Outreach Ministry in Lansing tries to help wayward youths struggling in modern society. Experts say her ministry typifies the vast majority of revival, or fundamentalist, movements throughout the world. Advertisement http://ads.lansingstatejournal.com/RealMedia/ads/click_nx.cgi/www.lsj.com/stories/@Position1http://ads.lansingstatejournal.com/RealMedia/ads/click_nx.cgi/www.lsj.com/stories/@Position1 But to think the Osama bin Ladens of the world are what fundamentalism is all about is to do fundamentalists an injustice.
Religious revivalists, as they are more accurately called, most times are merely trying to save souls occupied by MTV or the latest designer drug. They might be corner preachers here or Muslim do-gooders in Afghanistan. They want to feed children and do God or Allah's work.
The religiously violent are another thing. Those who attacked the United States on Sept. 11 seemed to care less about souls and more about politics. Abortion-clinic bombers don't seem to be much different.
"You're always going to have the Osama bin Ladens. You're always going to have the Timothy McVeighs," said Kevin Jaques, an assistant professor of Islamic Studies at Indiana University. Indeed, experts agree revivalism, whether righteous or violent, is here to stay. It's a natural human response to a complex world, a byproduct of modern society.
A world in turmoil
In the final snippet of the past millennium, the world hit fast forward, from wood-burning stoves to microwave ovens, from Victorian-age women in cloth up to their chins to belly-baring pop stars and surgically enhanced cleavage.
Mothers went to work. Gays and lesbians fought for their rights. Abortion clinics sprouted, and the once clearly defined lines between love, marriage and sex blurred.
The world grew more complex, and as a result, experts say, society responded with religion.
The Christian fundamentalist movement sprouted in pre-WWI America after the liberalism of the late 19th century, and the Religious Right marched forward in the late 1970s after years of suffering with free love.
Some religious experts say this is a natural response to a complex world, and it explains why fundamentalism is easily found everywhere, including in Lansing, among most religions.
Families, whether traditional, blended or single-parent, struggle in this complexity to keep their children away from drugs and away from kids whose parents lost the fight.
Lured, though, by a pop-culture that idolizes gang symbolism and mini skirts or left vulnerable by low self-esteem, many children have fallen victim, and society with its modern technologies, its gadgets and its medical leaps hasn't been able to save them.
That's where places such as Vision of Love Outreach Ministry come in. Preaching from the pulpit on Lansing's west side, pastor Cora Duncan offers a fundamentalist message of hope: the promise of salvation and the clarity to see right from wrong.
Last Sunday's message was aimed straight at parents confronted by children who are wise to the modern world and quick to extort worldly possessions by playing one parent against the other.
"It takes prayer to know what to do," she said.
Her ministry focuses on literal translation of the Bible as a way of bringing meaning to life. Experts say Duncan's work is no different from the revivalist movements elsewhere in Christianity or in Islam in that her goal is to help people decide between right and wrong.
Duncan offers answers to complex questions created by a complex world.
"We have had them come in off of the street and wanting to be saved from using drugs," she said.
"We have so many children out there who are raising themselves."
Pastor Duncan isn't likely to run out of work. The modern world isn't about to reverse course and become simpler. Cell phones, digital television and one-night stands are sure to remain part of American culture, meaning revivalism is here to stay.
"There's going to continue to be an appeal of these things as there has been in the past just because the world is not getting any simpler," said Andrew Buckser, associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University in Indiana. He specializes in religion and culture in modern society.
Where once a family with a wood-burning stove had complete control over the heat source, today's natural gas-fired furnaces force families to rely on a utility company miles away.
"This is disconcerting to us," he said. "This is not how human beings have lived for the last 4,000 years."
The promise of salvation is a powerful draw for revivalist Christian churches, just as it would be for revivalist Islamic movements in places such as Afghanistan. While Christianity and Islam are very different religions, there are striking similarities. For example, take the statements offered by religious fanatic bin Laden and Christian fundamentalist the Rev. Jerry Falwell in the days following the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The Mirror in London reported bin Laden as saying the attacks were "a punishment from Allah."
Within days of that statement, Falwell said God had allowed the attacks as a result of the work of feminists and abortion-rights supporters and civil liberties groups.
Shaping the world
Revivalism, whether Christian or Islamic, won't go away. It is part of the world, and as experts point out, a part that is good. Even if society gave up its MTV and its Cosmo Girl and reversed time to a simpler era, there would still be a need for people like Duncan.
Karen Armstrong, a visiting religion scholar at Harvard University and the author of several books on Islam and other major world religions, argues in her 2000 book, "The Battle for God," that fundamentalist movements have shaken the world for centuries.
The deportation of Jews and Muslims from Europe and the Spanish Inquisition prompted fundamentalist movements. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire fostered others, and in the last century, amid growing world secularism, fundamentalism upended things once again.
In the late 1970s, an Iranian ayatollah brought down the western-friendly regime of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, inciting a revolution, and in Egypt, while President Anwar Sadat recognized the state of Israel and made overtures to the West, young Egyptians appeared to turn toward religion.
"They were donning Islamic dress," Armstrong wrote, "casting aside the freedoms of modernity, and many were engaged in an aggressive takeover of the university campuses."
In 1981, Islamic fanatics assassinated Sadat.
At virtually the same time, the Christian religious right was gaining control in the United States. Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority garnered political power and attention.
Today, the trend continues. Violent revivalism shapes the world of Israel and Palestine and now New York City and, therefore, the rest of America. Lives here in mid-Michigan have changed. People open mail with greater caution. They hesitate before arranging flights. They wonder about the future.
Perhaps the only thing the singular American, whether Christian or Muslim, can do is educate himself. Buckser sees that as a way for people to cope with uncertainty.
The collapse of the World Trade Center illustrated how remote places in a far away country such as Afghanistan can affect the lives of people in Lansing.
"Knowing less about it," he said, "will surely leave you in the dark to do anything."
Guess I must have missed the last time a group of these Christians crashed planes into buildings filled with thousands of people . . .
McVeigh was not a religious man. The comparison of the two in the context of religion is vacuous and misleading.
I know a good number of gentle, sincere, compassionate, and loving Christians (those who actually follow the teachings of Jesus)... and they are nothing like the Taliban.
Many have repeated that line about McVeigh. I don't EVER recall him justifying his actions on a religious basis. In fact, he had no use for religion until his execution day when he called for a priest to administer the last rites.
And I even know some Libertarians who aren't child molesters.
Yes, they are VERY different -- about as different as you can get. It's all in the basis: 1) abortion-clinic bombers are doing exactly the OPPOSITE of what their holy book (old and new testaments) tells them; 2) Muslim terrorists are doing EXACTLY what their holy book (Koran)tells them to. It's pretty simple, really.
Do you know any libertarians who are?
Funny. The last world war fought over religion was the 30 Years War in the 17th Century. Then came the Seven Years War, the Wars of the Spanish and Austrian Successions, the Napoleonic Wars, WWI, WWII, the Cold War, all fought over political and nationalistic disputes. I say the secularists ought to answer for a very bloody history.
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I'm don't think I'd go quite that far, but she certainly has no idea of the diffence between a fundamentalist and an extremist.
The issue here is the target. Abortionists kill innocent people for a living. They are not randomly targeted innocents.
Militant Islam targets the kafir - the nonMuslim. The WTC victims were murdered because they were either American or happened to be in America. It didn't matter if they were completely innocent of the supposed wrongdoings the terrorist ascribed to the US.
Abortionists are murdered as a response to the deeds they actually perform in their daily lives.
People who kill abortionists are not selecting random targets - although they are taking the law into their own hands.
The difference is Christians rebuke such talk..they do not condone the insane with their money or silence..We pray for change,we lobby for change..we do not ram planes into buildings to make a point......Islam is a religion of murder
you shed a mans blood by man your blood will be shed
in other words what they did to us...we now do to them for we are not in the wrong.
Your article in the Lansing Journal ia an abomination! I am having a difficult time deciding if your agenda is to demonize Christians ,or excuse the Taliban. Either way you are a very foolish and blind woman, if you can not see the difference. When the reason you can not open your mail in peace,or ever fly on a plane again with out looking at the faces around you are because of the terror of some outlaw Baptist Church...then let me know!
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