The Future of Fundamentalism
Sermon by Steve Edington
January 10, 2010
It's one of those images that I'm sure will stay with me throughout my life, even though it happened well over twenty years ago. I was delivering a sermon to the congregation I served before coming here, in Stony Brook, New York. Their worship space was such that the pulpit was on a slightly elevated platform just a few feet away from the first row of seats. There was a woman seated in the front row, practically right smack-dab in front of me, clutching a Bible as about as tightly as an object can be clutched by a human being. I could see that whites of her knuckles.
I was holding forth on a pretty basic UU type of sermon, which included some references - as I recall - to Thomas Jefferson and his Deism and his Jefferson Bible in which he edited out any references that supposedly supported the divinity of Christ. I tried to keep my delivery directed at the congregation at large, but my eyes kept being drawn back to those white knuckles on the Bible.
The back story here is that the woman's husband had begun attending services several weeks earlier. As coffee hour was winding down, during his first visit to the congregation, he got me into a conversation about some tensions in his marriage that revolved around religious matters. He had not been raised in, or exposed to, any strong religious faith himself, but had fairly regularly attended and participated in the life of a rather fundamentalist congregation his wife was a part of, largely to be supportive of her in what he recognized as being a very important part of her life.
But then he'd decided to do some religious exploring and questioning of his own which eventually led him to check out the local UU congregation - where he very much liked what he was seeing and hearing. As you can probably imagine, this created a certain amount of tension on the home front - which may well have been the surface issue for some deeper troubled currents in their relationship.
I think the gentleman brought his wife to the service on the morning in question to let her know that he wasn't getting sucked into some weird or mysterious cult. She and I had a pleasant coffee hour conversation when the service ended, even as we largely steered clear of religious matters. This all took place as I was closing out my ministry in Stony Brook before coming here, so I do not know what the eventual outcome was with respect to this gentleman's religious explorations, and his and his wife's marriage.
In what is now the seventh decade of my life, there's a lot of stuff that has faded into the mists but the image of that woman's vise-like grip on a Bible - in reaction to a sermon I was delivering - has stayed vivid. It's an image that also helps me understand the nature of fundamentalism in at least as good a way as all the words that have been written on the subject. It is really one expression of a very natural and practically universal human phenomenon - which is the impulse to grab onto something that's seemingly solid in the midst of what is perceived as an unsure or threatening or dangerous situation.
I got my latest taste of this phenomenon back on Christmas Day on the last leg of a flight to Charleston, West Virginia where Michele and I spent several days with members of my family. As our small twin-engine prop jet approached the Charleston airport it got caught in some pretty severe crosswinds, and did some pretty serious pitching around, to the point that it felt like we were going to do a roll - which didn't quite happen. Before I even knew what I was doing I grabbed the seat in front of me with the same intensity that the woman of whom I just spoke grabbed her Bible. A few minutes later we were taxiing up to the terminal and that was that. But I experienced - if only for a few fleeting seconds - that primal human instinct to hold onto something you at least think is solid when it seems that your world is turning upside down.
Of course, my grabbing the seatback no more affected the actual operation of the plane than the woman's gripping her Bible affected the content, and the historical accuracy, of my sermon. But in both cases those kinds of things didn't matter. In both cases each of us were making an instinctual response to a perceived threat to our safety and well being.
I offer all this as backdrop to my final reading venture of 2009 which was Dr. Harvey Cox's latest book The Future of Faith. I read it during my just mentioned year-end visit to the home country. I can't pin it down, but I find something strangely appropriate about reading a book called The Future of Faith in the days after I'd momentarily wondered if I were going to be splattered on the side of a West Virginia mountain on Christmas Day. Like much of what Dr. Cox writes, there's a lot of good stuff in here; but I'm not sure I share his contention that religious fundamentalism is a fading phenomenon. I'll save that piece for later, however, so I can briefly share a bit of my personal journey with Dr. Cox.
This gentleman and scholar has been one of my religious, spiritual, and theological mentors and guides for the past 40 years and more. During my junior year in college I came across his first published book called God's Revolution and Man's Responsibility. As quaint and dated - and long out of print - as that book is now it shone the first ray of light through my then near-fundamentalist mind-set and let me know that there were and are other ways of being religious than the sin-and-salvation and Biblical literalism brand which I'd only known until then.
There's a much bigger story in all this than I've time for here, but Dr. Cox was among those who provided the first crack in my consciousness that eventually got me into the UU ministry; and I've read most of what he's written over the ensuing four and a half decades. His treatment of the nature and workings of religion and belief in our present age reveals a remarkable degree of depth and insight and historical perspective, which I find far more helpful than the superficial and dismissive treatments given these matters given by persons like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchins.
Harvey is not a UU. He's fine being in the liberal Protestant Christian camp. His wife is Jewish. He does show up at our UU General Assemblies now and then when asked to offer a presentation of some kind. The first time I met him, which was at a General Assembly, I told him that - depending upon who you ask - he either put me on the road to religious enlightenment, or ruined me for life and put me on the road to hell. He got a good laugh out of that.
The man is certainly not without a sense of humor. Last fall he was featured in The Boston Globe when he pastured a cow in Harvard Yard. The occasion was his retirement, at age 80 no less, as the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard University. In doing a little research Dr. Cox discovered that when this Chair was established in 1721 one of the perks was that the holder of the Chair was allowed to have his cow graze in Harvard Yard. Harvey figured he'd take advantage of that perk before relinquishing his position, so he got himself a cow - which he named Faith--and led her around the yard while dressed in full academic regalia. (Dr. Cox was in academic regalia I mean; not the cow).
To cut to his latest book, which I can only treat in very broad strokes, he draws an interesting distinction between faith and belief. Dr. Cox likes faith; likes it enough in fact to name a cow after it. But belief - well, not so much. Faith, as he uses the term, is about how we order and live our lives in the face of the wonder and mystery and awe - and, yes, anxiety - we feel as we look out upon our universe and wonder about our place in it. These are his words on the matter:
"Faith starts with awe. It begins with the mixture of wonder and fear all human beings feel toward the mystery that envelops us. But awe becomes faith only as it ascribes some meaning to that mystery. Since we are creatures who use language and symbols that vary from age to age and culture to culture, the meanings we ascribe inevitably differ. All religious and cultures are responses to the same fundamental mystery, but each perceives and responds in its own way."
A life of faith, then, is one that attempts to find meaning in the midst of mystery. Belief, as Cox defines it, occurs when this dynamic faith process becomes codified into a set of stated tenets that supposedly explain the meaning of the mystery to those who will simply subscribe to the stated tenets. Now it's practically inevitable that a journey of meaning will, at some point, lead to some conclusions or affirmations. The problem occurs when the affirmations that come about in this "faithing process," if you will, become elevated to fixed, and supposedly eternal and inflexible truths.
The example Cox uses for all this is one familiar to those of us who took part in the "From Jesus to Christ" seminar we did here last fall. Cox points out that the first three hundred years of what came to be called Christianity largely consisted of communities of persons - in and around the western Mediterranean - who were attempting to be faithful to the teachings and example of Jesus. That is to say, they saw in Jesus' life and teachings a meaningful way of living within the larger mystery that enfolds us all. Indeed, these people were originally called "Followers of The Way." Their "beliefs" as to who Jesus was and what he was about were quite varied and diverse, as various archeological discoveries over the past 50-60 years, like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts, have demonstrated. And these beliefs did generate a good deal of contention at times.
But those early Christians, with all their differing beliefs, still lived a more or less common faith, in the sense of trying to be faithful to what Jesus did and taught. It wasn't until the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire that it moved from being an evolving and changing and rather open-ended faith to a specifically codified set of beliefs, as enumerated in the Nicene Creed, and enforced by a centralized Church structure in Rome. This, in turn, made Christianity a religion of who was in and who was out, who had the supposedly "correct" beliefs and who didn't; and - in some tragic and horrible instances - who needed to be tried and punished for heresy and burned at the stake.
Cox's calls this process the move from the Age of Faith to the Age of Belief. He then goes on to claim that we're now in the midst of yet another shift. This time it's from the Age of Belief to the Age of The Spirit. That, in fact, is the subtitle of the book: "The rise and fall of belief and the coming age of the spirit." A good deal of the book is then given over to Dr. Cox offering examples from around the world of how this move from the Age of Belief to the Age of the Spirit is taking place.
I'm going to save that part for my sermon for two weeks from now which I've titled "Spiritual but Not Religious." That also happens to be the title of a conference I'll be attending in the week to follow; and Dr. Cox also makes reference to this recurring expression that seems to be gaining more and more currency. He sees the line "I'm spiritual but not religious" as just one of many indicators of this shift to which he speaks. As I say, I'll save my take on that one for a couple of weeks. For now I want to look at how Cox deals with fundamentalism in light of his thesis.
In a nutshell he believes that fundamentalism will fade as the Age of the Spirit gains ascendancy over the Age of Belief. Evangelicalism will still thrive, Cox feels, because it is more focused on what evangelicals call "the receiving of the Holy Spirit," than upon Biblical literalism. Evangelicals are conservative, Bible-centered Christians, no question about that. But their emphasis is more upon feeling "God in their hearts" than in keeping a codified set of beliefs up in their heads. Fundamentalists and evangelicals may well overlap in some cases, but they are not the same. Mega-churches, like those led by Rick Warren and Joel Osteen, are much more evangelical oriented than they are strictly fundamentalist; and they show little signs of fading at all. Dr. Cox recognizes this.
But even with that distinction, which is a valid one, I'm still not quite ready to accept - much as I'd like to - Dr. Cox's contention that fundamentalism, but not evangelicalism, is a fading phenomenon. All I need to do is recall the origins of Christian fundamentalism in America, which Dr. Cox himself describes in his book, to get at my reservations.
Far from being an "old time religion" American Protestant Christian fundamentalism took shape in the early years of the 20th century as a reaction to modernism. It was largely triggered by three things: One was Darwinism and the Theory of Evolution which challenged the notion that human beings were specifically and purposefully created by a Divine Being at a specific point in time for a Divine purpose. The second was Freudian psychology, although not the specifics so much which have been challenged from all sides. Instead, the whole notion that our personalities and actions are influenced by drives and desires and needs that have a sexual component was an affront and a challenge to traditional morality. The third was the evolving field of Biblical studies and criticism which demonstrated that the Bible - while still a work of great worth and value and worthy of study - was also a human document created over a large span of human history, and in response to particular human happenings. That challenged the whole idea of the Bible being a unified text which was uniformly and Divinely inspired.
All of that was plenty enough to send the plane into a barrel roll, and a cadre of conservative Christians grabbed the back of the seat by putting forth what they called the Five Fundamentals that one had to believe to be a "true Christian" in the face of all these alleged assaults that were supposedly being made upon the Christian faith. It was also their way of doing battle with those moderate to liberal Christians who were finding ways of adjusting their faith to the currents of the modern age. In fact, it was - and still is, actually - the moderate to liberal Christians who were and are as much the target of the fundamentalists in this country as are the out-and-out atheists or agnostics, who are generally seen as being beyond the pale anyway.
Just for the record, the Five Fundamentals are: 1. The verbal inerrancy of the Bible - every word literally true. 2. The Virgin Birth of Jesus. 3. Substitutionary Atonement; meaning that Jesus' death was to redeem your sins. 4. The bodily resurrection of Jesus. And 5. The Second Coming of Christ in all his glory. That first one, the verbal inerrancy of the Bible, is the cornerstone of the other four.
I'm not going to go into any of that now other than to note that the idea of the verbal inerrancy of the Bible, a text which I do respect to which I've devoted years of study, is patently absurd; and once that one goes those other four fundamentals collapse as well. The larger point, however, is that fundamentalism, whatever it's specific content and whatever particular religion or religious text it may be based upon, is an attempt to grab a hold of something that is at least felt to be solid whenever it seems like the foundations of one's world are being undermined or thrown into a tailspin.
This is why - with all the respect, admiration, appreciation, and indebtedness I feel towards Dr. Cox - I can't quite go with him and his idea that fundamentalism will fade as the Age of Belief gives way to the Age of the Spirit. I do happen to believe that his larger picture is largely on target. Taking the view from 30,000 feet (I seem to be big on airplane metaphors this morning) I believe the shift Cox describes is indeed taking place. It's just that on the ground there's going to be some serious rear-guard action, since any move from specific beliefs to a more generalized kind of "Faith in the Spirit", so to speak, is going to generate the very kinds of fears and anxieties and uncertainties for which fundamentalism provides a ready response.
I'll offer just one example because I know I need to wrap this up. Same-sex marriage is apparently becoming a 21st century version of those three things I cited earlier that gave rise to the Five Fundamentals. Even though it has no actual or practical effect at all upon the overall institution of marriage itself, on some deeper, instinctual level - in the minds of many folks - same sex marriage is an indication that the plane is about to do a barrel roll, and that the foundations of our culture are somehow being undermined. However irrational all that may be - and, so far as I'm concerned, truly is - doesn't seem to matter.
A perceived threat, rational or not, is going to generate a reactive response. There were vicious, and at times deadly, responses to the full enfranchisement of African Americans in our country in my own lifetime. There were heated responses, much of them religiously based, against the enfranchisement of women. We even fought a Civil War in part over the matter of whether or not there should be human slavery in our country. Any threat to any alleged "way things are supposed to be" is going to generate a reaction; and fundamentalism of one kind or another - religious and/or political - will be a part of that reaction. So, Harvey Cox, I love you man; but it ain't gonna go away.
Two quick things in closing now, as to how what I've offered this morning is germane and challenging to us as liberal religious persons of the UU persuasion. First, we need to remain as committed as ever to our principles of affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person and of justice, equity and compassion in human relations. History teaches us well that every move to advance these goals - by persons of a wide variety of faith stances and personal convictions - will draw a counter punch. For all the advances we may make we're never fully home free.
The second point or challenge, to which I'll return in two weeks, has to do with how we as a liberal religious community respond to what I do believe, even given some of my reservations, is a coming Age of the Spirit. How do we respond to those who say they are "spiritual but not religious" and what does that phrase even mean? Simply debunking outworn beliefs offers little, if anything, to persons seeking greater spiritual depth in their lives. To play on a metaphor coined by Jesus we need to offer the bread of affirmation and not a stone of negation. I happen to think we do pretty well on the spiritual affirmation part and we can always do more. I'll save the rest of that for the 24th following our observation Dr. King's birthday next Sunday.
Perhaps there is an Age of the Spirit dawning as Dr. Cox predicts. In some ways, however, that working of the Spirit has long been an ongoing thing. That's what our closing hymn is about. "It Sounds Along the Ages." Let's sing it together
Stephen D. Edington
January 10, 2010
