Episode 3 - Defining the Terms: Fundamentalism “An Addiction to Certainty”
Intro - The life of our soul is a journey with many twists and turns. This journey has times of discovery, growth, disruption, examination, perplexity, and harmony. Soul Sojourn is a podcast that plans to explore this journey of the soul; considering the different segments of the journey, the different stops we make along the way, and the divergent paths that we can take as unique people with distinctive life experiences. Soul Sojourn hopes to provide room for diverse expressions of faith and welcomes questions and doubts about the journey of the soul. It recognizes that so often there is mystery in life and faith, questions that have no answers, and deep levels of uncertainty and precarity that are present in our lives.
Welcome - Welcome to Soul Sojourn. My name is Jenn Pedersen and I’m so happy you have joined me here today for the 3rd episode of Soul Sojourn. I sit here on a snowy day in Iowa, enjoying the beauty of the following outside my window. It’s March here and we’ve had some warmer days in the last few weeks - days when the temps reached into the 50s - days when hearty midwesterns throw off their coats and declare that 50 degrees is so nice and warm. But then the weather turns and we’re back to winter temps and hopefully one of the final snowy days of this winter season. In this in-between time of transitioning from season to season, there is that underlying uncertainty of each day - not knowing if it will be warmer and sunny or cold, cloudy and snowy. We all live with varying levels of uncertainty in our lives and we all have a different awareness of uncertainty and different tolerance for uncertainty in our lives. I think more than during any other time in my life, the last few years have brought the reality of uncertainty to our awareness more and more as we are living through a worldwide pandemic.
The philosophies of faith I’m going to explore today are ones that seek certainty - seek set answers and hope to find the right way, but as with the changing seasons and seasons of turmoil in our world swirling around us, certainty is elusive. The concepts I’m exploring in this episode are foundational concepts or terms, foundational theologies of the background of my story.
The focus of the episode today is fundamentalism. As I was preparing for this episode, I went a bit far down the theological rabbit hole pulling out theological resources from my master’s in theology program which I’ll be sharing a bit of during this episode. And I will admit there are parts of today’s episode that are a bit dense, but I think it’s important to explore the meanings behind terms.
Often, we can hold different definitions of the terms or concepts we use in life and as a result not really understand one another, or talk past each other because we might be using similar terms but meaning very different things. So I’m going to share the definitions of these terms today and also share how these terms have affected the life of my soul as well as considering how the impact of these theologies or philosophies have impacted our culture in a larger way. I hope you’ll stick with me as we dive a bit deeper and explore these important theological ideas that impact not only the Christian culture in our country, but the broader culture as well. So let’s dive in.
What is fundamentalism? I’ve been using this term recently to describe the background of my journey. As I began using this term I was a bit cautious of it, wondering if I was being too harsh and knowing that some who are a part of this type of religious system would be bothered by the use of this term. But I’ve found it to be the most descriptive of the religious systems I used to be a part of. And as I prepared for this podcast and looked at the definitions available about fundamentalism, I found it to be very accurate.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines fundamentalism as “A form of religion, especially Islam or Protestant Christianity, that upholds belief in the strict, literal interpretation of scripture; or as a strict adherence to the basic principles of any subject of discipline.” Britannica.com says this about fundamentalism - “It is a type of conservative religious movement characterized by advocacy of strict conformity to sacred texts. Once used exclusively to refer to American Protestants who insisted on the inerrancy of the Bible, the term fundamentalism was applied more broadly beginning in the late 20th century to a wide variety of religious movements.”
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Christian fundamentalists vigorously opposed theological modernism, which involved the attempt to reconcile traditional Christian beliefs with modern science and history. The term fundamentalist was coined in 1920 to describe conservative Evangelical Protestants who supported the principles laid out in The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, a series of 12 pamphlets that attacked modernist theories of biblical criticism and reasserted the authority of the Bible. The central theme of these pamphlets was that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Associated with this idea was the view that the Bible should be read literally whenever possible and that believers should lead their lives according to the moral precepts it contains, especially the 10 commandments.
Inerrant and literal are two key terms here that may not be familiar to all and terms I believe are important to explore further as a part of this perspective. Biblical inerrancy boils down to the belief that the Bible is free from error in matters of science as well as those of faith. This issue is a much larger factor in American fundamentalism than in other parts of the world. In 1978, 200 evangelical leaders came together to write a statement meant to defend this position against liberal trends in Bible interpretation. This became known as the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. As part of this statement there was language that also held to a literalist view of the text as well - stating that events written of in the first book of the Bible - such as creation, the fall and the flood were all factual events that happened just as reported in the book of Genesis.
Some in fundamentalism to this day reject the discoveries of science in most recent history and desire to hold to a literalist reading of the Old Testament. This perspective forces Christians to choose between science and faith and can do great harm to people who are often told by leaders in the Church that they must check their intellect at the door, they must put aside knowledge they have gained through science in order to be a true Christian. My husband faced this kind of rhetoric when he expressed his doubt in a young earth perspective - the concept held by many fundamentalist Christians that the earth is only about 10,000 years old or less. He was attacked and shamed because he, as a science minded person, could not reconcile the world around him with this young-earth perspective. These attacks on my husband, and the questioning of his commitment to the faith as a result were damaging in many ways. More than 10 years after these attacks took place, another leader who was involved reached out and apologized to my husband - that was really powerful, it gave me hope that people can change and open their minds to other perspectives.
As we consider the history of the fundamentalist movement it’s interesting to note that it did not begin as a political movement. From the 1920s until the late 1970s, most Christian fundamentalists avoided the political arena. A basic theme of Christian fundamentalism, especially in its early years, was the doctrine of separation: real Christians must remain separate from the impure and corrupt world of those who have not been born again. But belief and practice do not always coincide. Starting in the late 1970s many fundamentalists embraced political activism.
I recently read an incredibly concise and succinct summary of the shift in the fundamentalist perspective from separation to political involvement. Glennon Doyle writes in her book “Untamed” “In the 1970s, a few rich, powerful, white (outwardly) straight men got worried about losing their right to continue racially segregating their private Christian schools and maintaining their tax-exempt status. Those men began to feel their money and power being threatened by the civil rights movement. In order to regain control, they needed to identify an issue that would be emotional and galvanizing enough to unite and politically activate their evangelical followers for the first time. They decided to focus on abortion. Before then - a full 6 years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision - the prevailing evangelical position was that life began with the baby’s first breath, at birth. Most evangelical leaders had been indifferent to the Court’s decision in Roe, and some were cited as supporting the ruling. Not anymore. They wrote a new memo using freshly feigned outrage and rhetoric calling for ‘a holy way . . . to lead the nation back to the moral stance that made America great.’ They sponsored a meeting of 15,000 pastors - called the Religious Roundtable - to train pastors on how to convince their congregations to vote for anti choice, antigay candidates. They told them that to be aligned with Jesus, to have family values, to be moral, one must be against abortion and gay people and vote for the candidate that is antiabortion and antigay. Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan - who, as governor of California had signed into law one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country - began using the language from these new memos. Evangelicals threw their weight behind him, and voted in a bloc for the first time to elect President Reagan. The Religious Right was born. The face of the movement was the ‘pro-life and pro-family’ values stance of millions, but the blood running through the movement’s veins was the racism and greed of a few. This is how white evangelicals became the most powerful and influential voting bloc in the United States. This is ho evangelical leaders get away with the stunning hypocrisy of keeping their money, racism, misogyny, classism, nationalism, weapons, war, and corruptions while purporting to lead in the name of a man who dedicated his life to ending war, serving orphans and widows, healing the sick, welcoming immigrants, valuing women and children, and giving power and money away to the poor.”
Wow - this section of Glennon’s book took my breath away. It distilled down much that I’ve read from other sources on the shift toward politics the evangelical Church took in the 1970s. This shift in fundamentalism has been documented by numerous modern historians and even some by some of the leaders who were previously a part of this movement. This shift is laid out in great detail in a book I’ve mentioned before - Jesus and John Wayne. The subtitle of this book is “How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation”. As I read this book a couple years ago, I felt like I was reading my own history - there were so many stories that included events that had been a part of my life and faith tradition, and so many behind the scenes stories that I had not heard about of abuse and power mongering and dishonesty and hypocrisy. This shift has taken place largely during my lifetime and there are many elements of the story that are very familiar to me. The shift has brought greater divisions within our culture, within families and groups of friends, and has had a significant impact on the church. There is a clear dividing line which has been drawn between churches who have bought into the fundamentalist narrative and churches who are standing against it. Those that stand with this narrative call themselves Bible-believing churches and those that stand against it are often called liberal and heretical. But if we call ourselves Christians and are supposed to be followers of Christ - I have to ask myself, what were the key values that Jesus lived out in his life and how do they relate to this narrative?
I touched on the topic of biblical literalism earlier, but want to explore this topic a bit more. In both the Merriam-Webster and Britannica definitions there is a reference to “strict adherence to the sacred texts” & a literal view of the interpretation of scripture. This literalist view of scripture is very important to many people in my life. My husband facing attacks because of his questioning of the literalist view of a young earth - and with it 6 literal days of creation was my first experience with the negative impact of the literalist perspective in Christian faith. And as I was walking through my major faith shift and as I did the coursework for my master’s in theology I really wrestled with this concept. I had been raised to believe that we should view Scripture literally and was in churches into my 20s and 30s that held to this view. A pastor we had for 10 years would say of scripture, “If the common sense makes good sense, then seek no other sense.”
As I began learning more about the cultural context of the Bible and as I took a class on hermeneutics - which is the study of the interpretation of texts such as the Bible, I began to realize that understanding the Bible was not that cut and dry. The Bible is a compilation of 66 books written by over 40 authors to diverse people groups over a period of more than 2000 years. The Bible is divided into 2 main sections - the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament was originally preserved through an oral tradition and tells the story of the Israelites over a period spanning more than 1500 years from approximately 2000 BCE to 400 BCE. The setting of the Old Testament is the ancient Near East, extending from modern-day Iraq down to the Nile River in Egypt. The New Testament tells the story of the life of Jesus and the early Church and was written in a much shorter period of time - a period of less than 100 years. Following a period of oral transmission of the writings of the New Testament, they were recorded in written form in an attempt to ensure their accuracy. The books of the New Testament were written in 1st or 2nd century Palestine, a region that was under the rule of the Roman Empire at that time.
Key to interpreting or understanding the Bible is understanding the background of each of the 66 individual books of the Bible - who they were written by, who they were written to, what the culture of the day was - what values that culture held and how that influenced the writers of the books. The Old Testament begins with the story of creation and then tells the story of Noah and Abraham and Isaac and a line of patriarchs who led the nation of Israel through their early history. Modern Christians, with our empirical, 20th century, modern, fact based thinking can approach the Old Testament as a science textbook that lays out the scientific history of the world. But as I learned about the perspective of the ancient near east and their views of the world, I learned that the authors of the Old Testament would have approached their recording of the story of the Israelites in a very different way. Factual story-telling was not the key focus of the people of this time.
John Walton in his book Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament writes, “If we do not bring the information from the ancient cognitive environment to bear on the text, we will automatically impose the parameters of our modern worldview, thus risking serious distortion of meaning.” This book was very eye opening for me as I worked on my master’s in theology. Walton also talks about how cosmic geography impacts how people understand the shape and structure of the world around them. Cosmic geography is a term that refers to how people understand the world around them - the division of the sky and the land and its starting point. Throughout the Bible, we find the common ancient view that the cosmos was a 3-tiered order made up of 3 distinct tiers stacked on top of each other with the heavens in the upper tier, the earth in the middle tier and the “netherworld” in the bottom tier. Obviously our cosmic geography is quite different today with the scientific advances that have been made and the understanding we now have about the world and the universe beyond, an understanding that continues to grow.
This literalist view of interpreting Scripture certainly doesn’t stop at the issue of science and how we view the world. Another major area that it impacts is hierarchical structures of culture. As you read the Bible you find a very patriarchal view of culture woven throughout much of the text. Some in the fundamentalist perspective believe that this is prescriptive - that these are guidelines we should continue to follow. I would argue that the patriarchal structures written of in the Bible are descriptive - they are a telling of the history of the people of the time of the Bible, and certainly we find patriarchal cultures throughout much of the history of the world. But as I shared in the last podcast, I believe Jesus came to break down these structures and bring freedom for all people. We’ll be diving into the topic of patriarchy and its ongoing negative impact in a future episode so I won’t go too deep into this topic right now, but I invite you to join me in a couple weeks to hear more about this topic.
The authors of the New Testament were living under the Greco-Roman Empire. This culture was very oppressive and very misogynistic. It was an empire that sought to express its power over people. Understanding what the author’s cultural context was, and the cultural context of the audience as well, is important in attempting to interpret all texts. Slavery was a common part of this culture and women had very few rights as well, apart from the rights given to them by a father or husband. New Testament household codes - the instructions given on the gender roles of the people of the family, closely resemble the household codes of the culture of the time, which can cause us to question whether the New Testament household codes should be carried forward as instructions for how we are to live today in our families. There are so many rules and guidelines given in the Bible that we no longer follow, so how do we decide which ones are intended to be carried forward?
The words from Galatians 3:28 which says “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” would have been very revolutionary in the culture it was written in and to. A culture that held to strong hierarchical structures and set views of the roles of various people in society including roles assigned according to race, position as free or enslaved and the value of people based on their gender would have been very shook by the idea that these hierarchies no longer held sway in the community of Jesus followers. This would have been a very challenging perspective for those in the culture of the time - perhaps most challenging for those in the higher tiers of the hierarchy. But I imagine this idea laid out by Paul in his letter to the church at Galatia would have been exciting and hopeful for those in the lower tier of the structures of the day.
The cultures of both the Old and New Testament times would have placed the importance of the community over the individual which also impacts how we read sacred texts. As Western, American hyper individualists, we bring an individually focused perspective to our reading of the Bible which can influence how we come to understand the texts. When we are seeking to understand the culture of the author and those the author was writing to in interpreting scripture we also must do our best to assess our own biases. Our Western individualism is one such bias. We all have bias - we all see things in a certain way because of where we grew up and how we grew up and the life experiences we have had. There are within all of our lives cultural presuppositions, cultural assumptions which we hold whether we acknowledge them or not. And all of this influences how we read the Bible - how we interpret the words we find there.
I’m so thankful for the pastor I’m serving with now - a person who approaches the Bible with much of this in mind and presents his weekly sermons as “An Interpretation of the Word” - acknowledging that there are many different ways to interpret Scripture and in this I see an openness and humility in him that has been lacking in many other pastors I’ve known, who seemed to think they had figured it all out - that their interpretation was the one right way. I myself struggled to keep an open heart in this way while I was preaching regularly - it’s an ongoing challenge for all of us to realize that we are fallible and are constantly growing and learning.
There is an addiction to certainty which I believe drives the fundamentalist perspective and I understand the appeal. It’s nice to feel like you have it all figured out - that it’s all settled and you don’t have to wrestle with things anymore. But as I walked through my shift in faith I could no longer make peace with the certainties that they had settled - the certainty that women are not good enough to lead - they are second class citizens in this world who often have little power or autonomy. I could no longer make peace with the certainties of bootstrap theology, which I shared about in the 1st podcast - a theology that is certain that all people have equal opportunities to succeed in our country if they will just try hard enough. I could no longer make peace with the certainties that God condemns people who do not conform to a cisgender heteronormative perspective of sexuality - that there is only one right way to express love in our world and that if you don’t fit within the gender you were assigned at birth and not are attracted to only those of the opposite sex, then you are outside of God’s will. I held to this perspective of human sexuality for many years, saying that we should love the person, but hate the sin. This was the approach we took with our children as they went through their adolescent years. But often I’ve seen this lead to acting in less than loving ways toward LGTBQ people. I’ve come to a place where I can no longer say I am certain about this.
Recently I’ve been considering the fact that I could easily move from a fundamentalism of conservative Christianity to a fundamentalism of progressive Christianity and spirituality if I’m not careful because of the allure of certainty. It’s so nice to think we have it all figured out. It brings calm and peace to our nervous system when we can place things in the “right” categories and resolve them in our minds in this way. But this also is what I believe has brought us to the precarious place we find ourselves in our country with the divisions widening and productive peaceful dialogue disappearing.
Life is full of gray - we want it to be all black and white, cut and dry, we don’t want to live in the in-between places of changing seasons that leave us questioning what life will be like from day to day. It would be easier that way for sure, to live in the black and white, in the certainty - but it’s just not how it is.
Because of all of this I’ve moved away from the fundamentalist Christian perspective and I’m trying to find a way to live out my faith, without moving to a different kind of fundamentalism - I’m trying to live in the gray areas - in the areas in-between - in the uncertainty, trying to be open to change and learning and growing instead of having to take hold of certainty all the time.
As I close this episode I’d like to share “A blessing for Letting Go and Stretching Beyond”
by Rev. M Jade Kaiser as an encouragement toward continued growth and stretching for us all.
May today offer you what your spirit needs
to evolve, to expand, to unfold.
May it stretch you, but just enough.
Not by force nor demand,
but like an invitation that opens slowly,
too careful to be rushed.
May you be brave enough to loosen your grip
on what you know and perceive –
on what you have learned from fear
or inherited from lineages of cruelty.
May you give thanks for all the sources that gifted you
with survival and wisdom, perspective and protection –
but not let your gratitude unnecessarily wed you to them forever.
Everything has a season, a context, a place and a time – even truths that have freed you.
Maybe there are some things that served you well for an era,
but not any longer.
Maybe it’s time to rethink, reshape, review.
Maybe you’re ready to release another untruth
handed to you early on,
meant to keep you in line, in order, in compliance.
What might be replaced with acceptance
of your power and potential?
For the sake of your own becoming,
and also, us all.
Your soul-work is essential to the labors of love –
collective and eternal.
Material, relational, and communal repair are all forms of healing
made possible by souls entangled
in shared longings and commitments.
So may this day feed you and challenge you,
surprise and comfort you,
that you might have what you need
to be courageous, to be humble,
and to let your soul grow.
– Rev. M Jade Kaiser, enfleshed
I will continue my mini-series on defining the terms in the next episode exploring the theology of free will and its impacts. And from there we will dive into patriarchy, and gender roles, and look at how those terms have affected me personally and how I believe they affect many in our culture.
Thanks so much for taking the time to listen today, for sticking with me through our theology lesson. I hope that what I shared was helpful in some way for you on your own soul sojourn. Perhaps this episode can help you to begin to consider what orthodoxy, what beliefs you are holding and how those beliefs impact your orthopraxy - how you walk about your own faith journey. I look forward to what is to come, what future stops we’ll take along the journey together. I’ll see you at the next stop.