After the terror attacks of
September 11, 2001, the Reverend Pat Robertson
declared, "Why it's happening is that God Almighty
is lifting his protection from us." The Reverend
Jerry Falwell exclaimed, "The abortionists have
got to bear some burden for this because God will
not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million
little innocent babies, we make God mad." Falwell,
whose influence has declined faster than his name
recognition, retracted these remarks, but the
effect of this and many other stumbles by US
evangelical leaders amounts to a syndrome. At the
risk of
coining a new Bushism, I call
it "fundaresentalism".
Evangelical
Christianity is the source of America's strength
and the long-term key to its global influence, as
denominations of US origin gain converts faster
than any other faith. Faith has kept the angel of
demographic death away from America's shores while
the first-born Christian cultures in Europe wither
and die. Yet evangelical leaders display episodes
of appalling silliness, betraying a bucolic
backwardness that bans the enormous evangelical
movement from America's governing classes.
Tim LaHaye, author of the best-selling
Left Behind series of theo-fiction, insists
that we take the Bible literally, which is to say
mindlessly. This seems a good opportunity to
continue my occasional series, "Why Are Americans
So Stupid?"
In my last installment (American Idolatry, August
29), I observed that America's popular music
descends from the whining complaint of American
rural folk. Resentment causes Americans to listen
to singers who sound like them and with whom they
can identify, rather than singers who sound much
better than them. Children prefer finger-painting
to Diego Velazquez because they feel at home in
the world of children and feel lost in the world
of results. Americans who grew up in the 1950s and
afterward remain in a perpetual childhood of peer
identification, hostile to all authority.
That is not quite true, I concluded in the
August 29 essay; most Americans acknowledge the
Bible as a supreme authority. But that is not
quite the case if the Bible is to be taken
"literally", that is, the way an ignorant man
would read it on the surface. In that case, the
authority is not the Bible at all, but rather the
authority of the ignoramus who reads it. This
writer accepts the authority of the Bible, but
confesses his inability to understand most of it
without the assistance of learned commentators.
Paradoxically, biblical literalism is a
resentment-driven revolt against authority.
Professor Mark Noll addressed the "scandal
of the evangelical mind" in his eponymous book a
decade ago. As religious historian Grant Wacker
summed it up, "The problem, in short, is
evangelicals' appalling parochialism, their
unwillingness to break out of the vast but
all-too-comfortable ghetto of evangelical churches
and colleges and publishing networks and engage an
intellectual world long ago captured by [Karl]
Marx and [Charles] Darwin and [Sigmund] Freud."
[1] But I am talking about something more
workaday, namely the way in which daily
evangelical practice turns millions of people into
idiots.
If one is compelled to take every
word at face value, the reader stumbles into an
impenetrable swamp in the first chapter of
Genesis. This startling document breaks with all
conceivable precedents in numerous ways. To begin
with, it posits a god who merely is there, unlike
the gods of the pagan world who are born and
presumably also will die. The gods are immortal
but not eternal and ultimately subject to fate.
The biblical god stands outside of nature in a
universe that knows no such thing as fate. The
heavenly bodies, divine beings in all previous
theogony, are set in the heavens as lamps and
watches for the convenience of humankind. [2]
The Holy See long ago accepted the notion
that evolution did not impugn the biblical
creation story. America's literal Bible readers,
however, spend endless time and treasure
attempting to suppress what they falsely perceive
as a slur upon biblical theauthority. This is a
gigantic waste of time, like beating one's head
against the wall. But beating one's head against
the wall causes brain damage over time. It is easy
to dismiss this effort as stupid, but in fact it
is much worse than that. It recalls the exchange
between the stuffed tiger Hobbes and six-year-old
Calvin in Bill Watterson's old comic strip. "Do
you have the right to be ignorant?" asks Hobbes.
Calvin returns, "I refuse to find out!"
If
one could put the biblical literalists into an
appropriate comic strip, the thought bubble here
would read: "We are the righteous, virtuous
country folk fighting against the decadent
metropolis. We may be ignorant, but we have a
right to be ignorant, and we will fight for the
right to be ignorant by ruling out of order any
discussion that would put our ignorance in
question!"
Creationism is a distraction,
though, compared with the problem of how
Christians should address Islam. Pat Robertson
shouts his belief that the Muslims are heathen
from the rooftops. In a 2003 speech in Israel, he
said:
Make no mistake - the entire world
is being convulsed by a religious struggle. The
fight is not about money or territory; it is not
about poverty versus wealth; it is not about
ancient customs versus modernity. No - the
struggle is whether Hubal, the moon god of
Mecca, known as Allah, is supreme, or whether
the Judeo-Christian Jehovah God of the Bible is
supreme. [3]
It is crude, clumsy and
wrong to dismiss Allah as an Arabian moon god.
Islam is not a simple extension of prior paganism.
A universal religion that knows no ethnicity
cannot be lumped together with the heathen worship
of pre-Islamic tribes. The truth is more elusive.
There is a well-developed argument that
Islam is "a monistic paganism", and that Allah is
"the old pagan pantheon rolled up into one", as
German Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig wrote
some 85 years ago. I reported Rosenzweig's views
three years ago in this space. [4] Pope Benedict
offered a devastating judgment on Islam's ability
to reform, but it was intended only for the ears
of his inner circle of students, not for public
circulation. [5] A scandal erupted last year over
the pope's remarks on Islam to a seminar at his
summer residence, as reported by Father Joseph
Fessio, SJ, on a Florida radio talk show. My
report in this space contributed to the notoriety
of the incident. Father Fessio ultimately
apologized for making the pope's views public.
That is the misery of the West. The
evangelicals have no fear of offending Muslims and
say what they think; the crafty old men of the
Vatican understand the issues far better, but are
afraid to speak them above a whisper.
The
most extreme (and by far the silliest) expression
of US resentment is the Church of Latter-Day
Saints, or Mormons, one of the fastest-growing
denominations within America's new Great
Awakening. Its founding document is The Book of
Mormon, Joseph Smith's 1827 "translation" of
lost books of the Bible from golden tablets no one
else could see with the help of the aptly named
Angel Moroni. Anyone who can read this transparent
forgery without giggling should be condemned to
watch the South Park version of the history
of Mormonism on a closed loop until Judgment Day.
The mystery is why anyone would take this
nonsense seriously. The answer, I believe, is
The Book of Mormon's assertion that Jesus
Christ walked on American soil and that native
American were one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel.
The latter association has been conclusively
refuted by DNA evidence, which shows no genetic
link whatever between native Americans and Jews,
but no matter. The attraction of this silly
doctrine is that Americans might have their own
American revelation, with American references and
an American history. In other words, it is driven
by resentment against the unpleasant fact that
Americans remain beholden to the history of the
Old World.
The fact is that Americans are
beholden to the Old World and will be until
Americans can produce minds with the depth and
scope of a Soren Kierkegaard, a Karl Barth or a
Franz Rosenzweig. As I noted last year, the most
important theologian working today in the United
States might be an Orthodox Jew, Michael
Wyschogrod. [6] It is well and good to throw off
the authority of the compromised and often corrupt
state churches of Europe, but the threadbare
homespun of evangelical thinking is very, very far
from being a replacement.
It is not that
Americans are inherently stupid. They make
themselves stupid by resenting authorities that
seem distant and alien to them. Until that
changes, the evangelicals will be America's
non-commissioned officers, not its generals and
statesmen.
