Easy, you might say. They don’t. But you might be underestimating. I came across this yesterday, and spent much of the evening digesting it. I thought it was maybe sarcasm or paraody, until the author finally got down to business (ironically, right after the 2004 elections) explaining just how fundamentalists — christian fundamentalists, specifically — think.
The truth is, having been raised baptist and in the south, there isn’t anything here I haven’t encountered before or that I didn’t already know on some level. But this writer has clearly thought about it, and I could not have put it all together as well as he’s done. Probably because I rejected it so young that I never fully absorbed it. (Which, by the way, is fine with me.)
From what I can tell, it’s been around for a while — at least, a while in terms of the web — but I hadn’t come across this nine part essay, written by an ex-fundamentalist, that humourously and believably lays out the fundamentalist mindset. What’s remarkable is how well it holds together, provided you accept the basic premises of fundamentalism. Taken to it’s logical extreme, it leads to stuff like this.
A fundamentalist soldier may believe he is doing Christian work, trying to “free the Iraqis” and open the way for them to hear the Gospel, but just let the Iraqis not show appropriate gratitude, just let them cling to their “false” Islamic beliefs, and that fundamentalist soldier will probably hate them very quickly for “rejecting freedom and rejecting God.” It will suddenly be much easier to blow their brains out, or torture them in an Iraqi prison. In that case, he will become God’s instrument of judgement, and those Iraqis will deserve it because they stubbornly cling to their rebellion against God.
Taking it in reverse, this was why the 9/11 hijackers so fervently believed they were doing God’s work in taking more than 3,000 lives with those planes. In their view, we are the inferior, degraded culture, A fundamentalist soldier may believe he is doing Christian work, trying to “free the Iraqis” and open the way for them to hear the Gospel, but just let the Iraqis not show appropriate gratitude, just let them cling to their “false” Islamic beliefs, and that fundamentalist soldier will probably hate them very quickly for “rejecting freedom and rejecting God.”
And then there are the rest of us. The non-believers, tied to the tracks, between these two trains as they speed towards each other.
Anyway, this seems like appropriate Sunday reading. From the introduction to the most recent installation, I found it a fascinating read, and it looks like the author isn’t done yet.
So perhaps it’s finally time to look at how Christian fundamentalist beliefs actually work themselves into the world. We’ve learned most of their foundational beliefs, and many of these beliefs explain why they behave as they do. But we need to examine some specifics, so we can see just how tightly their world view holds together as they put it into practise in the world. After that…perhaps we may be able to start finding the chinks in the wall, the jutting bricks that don’t quite fit, so they can be pulled out and the edifice can be brought down.
Now that is the part that I want to read.
Enjoy.
