Getting It

If you are, like me, one of those people who've assumed that the spasms of fervor rolling out of Christian corners since last November are nothing more than the latest media darling, the socio-political equivalent of Britney's navel or J-Lo's ass, you may want to reconsider. Yes, these folks have certainly been getting coverage disproportionate to their numbers, to their representativeness in American culture, and to the sway they lent our last election. Yes, radically conservative religious sects have been a fixture of American culture since colonial days, and though they've sunk beneath the surface of popular consciousness for long stretches they've also had a habit of coming back up for noisy air. You have to keep in mind that less than a hundred years ago it was illegal to sell or purchase alcohol in this nation; it wasn't atheists who hacked the taps. We got over that, of course. (We were even bequeathed a mainstay of American cultural mythology for our trouble: the gangster, a massive thumb in the eye of pious assurance and a figure that would, you'd think, give pause to anyone who presumes the darker impulses of human nature can be legislated away.)

Still, there are a couple of differences in the current uproar. The first is the movement's ambition. The second is its connections. For insight into both I'd point anyone interested — and you should all be interested, especially those of you in blue America, literally or figuratively — to the May 2005 issue of Harper's. A double feature therein tries to grapple with two of the most significant faces of the fundamentalist Christian political movement, and it makes for some creepy reading.

Why creepy? Maybe because of all the rhetorical antecedents from 1950s America, under McCarthyism, and 1930s Germany, during the late adolescence of National Socialism. Maybe because there's not even any real attempt to conceal the desire for a theocratic — well, revolution: that's really the only word. And maybe most of all because the rhetoric coming from Colorado Springs and Orange County — the settings of the two reports — is not just militant, it's militant in a Taliban kind of way as opposed to, say, a Malcolm X kind of way. These guys are shaping up to be some kind of domestic Hezbollah. They talk about "training camps"; they talk about "bombs" and "explosions"; they pass out maps of New York City with "targets" marked. Toward the end of the first piece, the author runs into a local fellow. The author explains he's from New York. The local fellow's response is to say, simply, "Ka-boom"; and frankly by this time it's not a surprise. It's more like a culmination.

Interesting to note that both authors — Jeff Sharlet in the first piece, about Colorado Springs and the New Life Church; Chris Hedges in the second, about the National Religious Broadcasters conference in Orange County, CA — fall into different but similar forms of breakdown by the ends of their pieces. I imagine they, too, expected something more innocuous, more akin to a purportedly disenfranchised group demanding its place at the national table, claiming a corner of public dialogue and calling for an end to past neglect. This is, after all, the common public face of the fundamentalist movement. We've been put down, picked on, shut out; and we're not going to take it any more — making America safe for Christians and all that, as if anyone had ever contended it shouldn't be. From the inside these movements look like quite something else. And how could they not? The claims of persecution have always been specious. Christians are the most powerful coalition of organized interest groups in the United States. They have been since Jamestown. The only way to see them as persecuted is to understand persecution as the denial of their desire — in their eyes, their right — to hold dominion over every square inch of earth and everything that moves, breathes, or thinks within it. Which is precisely what Sharlet and Hedges, in their research, found the groups gearing up for. If they were Islmamists, we'd be calling their plans a "jihad." We'd be calling them terrorists-in-the-making, or at least extremists, militants, hardline factions. But they're not Islamists, so I guess we just call it going to Sunday worship. Nonetheless, the intensity of their fervor, the anger and hatred and intolerance for difference that fuel it, seem to take both writers by surprise — and to drive them, frankly, in the end, a little mad. Pay attenion: we may all be driven a little mad before this is over.

Every time I start trying to write about these people, I find I don't want to do it. Something in me resists — feels it shouldn't be necessary, really; even to broach the subject is to lend it a credibility, a legitimacy it doesn't deserve. We are rational folk. It is 2005. Creationism? Outlawing the teaching of evolution? To a certain extent, it's a discussion that offends the intellect by its very existence.

They are right about me, you see. I want to dismiss them. More than that: I do dismiss them. I don't "get it"; I am utterly baffled by "it" in fact — it; them; the whole fanatical program. It is, in some sense, difficult for me to take such a worldview seriously on an intellectual level. I don't feel this way about all religious folk, only about the literalists: the ones who assign every word its face value, every recounting the merit of eyewitness news, every precept the crack of a military command. Those whose approach to religion involves the sublime — who view it as mystery, something utterly beyond them, inexplicable and unknowable but potent nonetheless, and moving, and present: these I respect. These I even understand, though I don't share. I take love as a simplistic analogy: it defies logic, yet it's essential. Others look into the darkness and call it God; I look in and call it Stuff I Don't Know.

Fundamentalisms take a different tack altogether. To these people, there are no mysteries. There are no metaphors. Theirs is a dry world of proscription and detail in which ecstasy, such as it is, comes not from encounters with the sublime but from the competitive, condescending joys of being in the club. Because the Bible is God's word, and because God's word is literal and complete, there is nothing to interpret; nothing's been left out or unsaid. There are no meanings to decrypt or contemplate, nothing to wonder at or about. It is what it is. It means what it says. Either God pronounced it or he didn't; and if he didn't there's no reason for us to take it up — except to convert it, silence it, exile it or have it killed.

Such a construction of the universe is binary, of course, even Manichean. The divisions are dull and predictable, all flowing from the base duality of God and Satan. Even this is simple: if a thing is not God, it must be Satan. One is right, therefore, or one is wrong; one is just or one is evil; one is saved or damned.

Like all binary systems, one side is only knowable with reference to the other. If you, like me, find yourself in a state of perpetual wonder at how fundamentalists can muster the time and energy to care what you do with yourself all day (and all night), here's your answer: you're the other side of their duality's coin. Robbed of the fertile terrain of an inner life — what's the point, when God's done all the thinking for you? — their gaze must turn outward. To be real to themselves, then, they must look at you.

How else to explain their claims that they're threatened by what you do? Threatened. Take the marriage example: that the marriages of straight men and women are tormented, even "damaged" (and yes, this is the language), by same-sex unions. They're serious about this, and they don't mean that gay couples come to their houses waving weapons and making demands. What they mean is that they understand themselves by what they are not, and that when the boundaries between what they are and what they are not get blurred — say, when gay couples are allowed to call themselves "married" under the law — then their understanding of what they themselves are gets eroded. Such an understanding of self comes from without, not from within; thus it really is fragile, and it really is dependent on who you are and what you do. Wittingly or not, you can become an affliction to people you've never met.

Most of us tend to view this as their problem. We don't care what they do, after all, regardless of how disagreeable we might find it — as long as they keep it amongst themselves and don't get imperial about it. As long as they don't make their problem, that is, our problem. But perhaps the point is that they've now decided to do just that. And this, too, when you consider it, is natural enough: we couldn't have expected a solution to come from within.

Here, too, may lie an explanation for why fundamentalists so often feel hurt and outraged by those who don't share their worldview. It is not easy to be a person of faith, especially a person of this kind of faith. It must be exhausting, in fact. It requires constant policing of the self, constant policing of others. It requires absolute devotion to the evangelical hierarchy, which is for all intents and purposes feudal: God as king; church leaders as vassals; everyone else as more or less serfs, doing the grunt work and paying the dues, avoiding question of the higher-ups. Even if they didn't believe those outside the fundamentalist community were against them as a matter of course, your everyday fundamentalist would pretty much have to build up a rich store of resentment toward those who exempt themselves from the hierarchy. If they must suffer, so must we all; and as in any kind of hazing, the most vigorous are always the ones who got it worst themselves. What does President Bush say about the Islamists — that "they hate is for our freedom"? Indeed.

But perhaps there's more subtle psychological interplay as well. Faith of such a severe sort is not only materially difficult to sustain, it is imaginatively difficult. It requires a repression of human impulses toward curiosity and inquisition. It requires the abandonment of logic. It requires the suspension, often, of sense. So as a nonbeliever, or even a different believer, you are a catalyst for cognitive dissonance. You challenge the fundamental presumption by your presence alone. You are a trial, and trials — even if a routine part of the life of faith — require energy to overcome. No one likes to face constant ontological threat. If there is only one truth, and if that truth is perfect, comprehensive, total, then on one level the person of severe faith must ask himself how anyone could stand outside it. I suppose there are ready answers for this — God gave man free will; a long history of infidels; tests of faith, etc. But these explanations don't really suffice. They make the almighty seem a petty trickster, playing games with humans as a cat might with mice. Such free will is an illusion, after all: to use it in pursuit of any program aside from God's is to be damned, and that's hardly a viable option. Free will thus understood looks more like a trick: choose correctly, all is well; choose poorly, you die. Is this really, to put it in earthly terms, how one wants to think of the Supreme Being spending His almighty time? Has He really nothing better going on? Is His idea of conducting the universe truly as petty as an adolescent boy's? And if it's not, why doesn't he just call a halt to the circus and employ His almighty authority in a giant shove to push everyone into line?

It's always tempting to wade into the waters of theological debate. But in this case they're beside the point. The debate we should be having now is not about theology but about political life, civic life, social existence and national cohabitation. The debate we should be having is about why not one politician in America would dare pronounce himself a skeptic, let alone an atheist, in the public space — not one. We should be talking about climates of fear and retribution, about the rhetoric of militant assault. We should be talking about whether we're willing, as a culture, to allow tolerance and pluralism — the concepts, the practices — to be debased, discouraged, even criminalized. We should be talking about whether the sadness of September 11 arose from the fact that New York, a representation of America, itself a representation of all these things — tolerance; pluralism; mutual respect in the public sphere; acceptance of difference, and a determination to coexist within it; the primacy of the will of the people (which is the meaning of democracy, after all); and the rule of impartial laws that enforce the above but do no more — if sadness arose from the fact that it was these things that were attacked, or from the fact that it was Islamist Arabs who did the attacking. Because it's looking more and more like it wasn't only radical Islamists on the streets of Palestine and Pakistan who might have been cheering the towers' fall.