Looking at fundamentalism

Fundamentalism

Thoughts on the phenomenon of fundamentalism

by Barbara Kellam-Scott

[2-8-02]

This essay grew out of a conversation in the Ecunet meeting "A CALL FOR A NEW REFORMATION," in which both Barbara Kellam-Scott and Jack Robertson were involved.

Jack Robertson, MDiv, MD (Ret.), MWS, is an Honorably Retired member of Eastern Oregon Presbytery, now living in Richardson, TX. He is a part-time Mission-Volunteer for the Office of Health Ministries, USA, National Ministries Division.

Barbara Kellam-Scott is a professional writer, an ordained Elder, and a member of the Witherspoon Society executive committee.

We have a strangely bipolar vocabulary for our shared faith, and it colors and troubles our ecclesiology. We say we are a church "always being reformed," and we expect and celebrate that God is doing a new thing. We also speak of our "received faith" and honor a tradition that goes back through the Reformation to a church established under and for the benefit of emperors. Our constitution includes a thick sheaf of confessions and creeds, most of which we cite or recite rather than discuss and examine, and which we have made very difficult to revise, even for errors in transmission or translation. But we also finger and retell the varying conditions in which our forebears in the faith wrote those confessions to express the new things God was doing in their days.

Ultimately, we look to one who was about the business of reforming the prevailing Judaism of his day. We quote him as saying he had come not to abolish that tradition, but to fulfill it. But we also quote him in several instances explicitly setting aside the religious laws of his day, overthrowing accepted practices and received wisdom, and critiquing the saints and prophets in whose name the law had been established.

These notions and models do make Christians unique, at least among religions with as strong a basis in concrete reality as books and particular human beings who are historicized as creating a faith and a practice through which to follow it. And Presbyterians may be the ultimately bipolar subset of these concrete yet reforming practitioners. Certainly we examine our conflicting urges more systematically than most. With such a democratic polity, what else could we do?

The urge to set our faith and practice in tangible and well-understood forms -- the urge to fundamentalism, our own and others' -- seems to intensify just when we are confronted by changes in the world and in pretty close proportion to trends toward reformation. It takes an astonishingly wide range of forms, and it takes no form. We are tempted to say "Gimme that old-time religion, it's good enough for me." But when my old-time religion confronts Osama's old-time religion, and Kenzo's, and Mercedes's, and Red Bird's, and especially when some of those religions' fundamentals are the wrongness of other religions, none of them are going to be good enough for the world. This, it seems to me, is a time more than any other for re-examining our tradition and received faith and its implications for the world as a whole.

We cannot escape looking at the world as a whole. We in the US have just had it forcibly, horribly, and inescapably demonstrated to us that the old-time religion of one person on the other side of the world can change every one of our lives. We may call for a reexamination of the foundational beliefs and fundamentalisms of Islam. We can very usefully learn more ourselves about those beliefs. But there's not much more we can do about Islam. Perhaps what we should do as we shake off the shock of September 11 is to review our own foundational beliefs and fundamentalisms, especially the ones we share across our civil society -- the ones that form the assumptions on which we operate and from which we approach the world. What is it about our fundamentals that is so intolerable to fundamentalist Islam? Is our traditional intolerance of Islam fundamental to our faith? Is it conceivable to maintain such intolerance in a world that is so interdependent?

One of the arguments we often hear among ourselves against reforming ourselves -- at least about going "too far" with reform -- is that a more received version of Christianity is the fastest growing religion in Africa and Asia, while Christian identification declines in the US, particularly in the most actively reforming denominations. Well, that's not exactly surprising, and for the same reason that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the US: It's starting from a smaller base. And these growing religions have a long way to go to be the majority religions on the continents where they're growing so fast.

They have an even longer way to go to be the religions whose foundational beliefs form those assumptions for their societies. Rather, Zairian Christianity will necessarily be something quite different from USAmerican Christianity, as Korean Presbyterianism, even in the US, even in the PC(USA), is necessarily quite different from the recognizable belief and practice of Presbyterianism that has grown up intertwined with USAmerican culture and tradition. Even if we stood stock still for hundreds of years, Zairian Christianity would never look like USAmerican Christianity. There are fundamental differences.

American Presbyterians must recognize, however, that even though it's still our assumptions that are poured into the foundations of the only world superpower, the world's center of gravity can shift and may be doing so. Other powers and principalities, with other assumptions in their pilings, may gain greater significance as we move through the 21st century. We will ignore or dismiss their assumptions at our peril.

Some may see the specifics of ancient promises in our tradition piling toward climax in such conflicts as Jewish and Muslim wrestling for Jerusalem and particular sites within the city and the area. They may applaud these conflicts as advancing the interests of neither combatant, but rather those of our own "middle child" among the Peoples of the Book. But we are three traditions citing promises of apocalyptic transformation of the world, promises made to each tradition by the same God. Why is it not conceivable that it is the same promise? Why is it not conceivable that we are included in each other's promises? Such conceptions require reformation of how we understand the promise and how we expect it to be fulfilled.

Even if we just start with the Peoples of the Book, if we honestly examine our foundational beliefs and the examples of our founders, we may discover ways to balance reform and fundamentalism. Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed all went to their roots, not to tear them out, but to aerate the soil that had become compacted around them. Yes, the tree may wobble a bit while new soil mixtures settle in. And we must be as careful not to break off some still-vital root in the digging as we are to prune the rotted ones. We must take care not to pile more soil on one side than the other, or the tree will list and ultimately fall. And we must not overfertilize and burn it. But if we stay safe on unbroken ground, we may miss the ways we are interconnected under the surface. It may well be that the means of not only surviving but thriving is to recognize that "radical" and "fundamental" are essentially two metaphors for the same thing.

There is a significant difference, however: If the ground shifts around the deepest and most firmly driven piling, the building will fall. But the growing, living root can extend into new soils and support both expansion of branches and extension of the crown ever higher. It's not clear how reform might proceed without preserving the fundamentals. It is clear that fundamentalism with no possibility of reformation is a sentence of death. At our best, fundamentalism and reform work in complement to help us stand firm as a basis for new growth. Perhaps that's something Christianity can teach some other traditions, if only we can understand and live it ourselves.

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