Stealing Jesus: how fundamentalism betrays Christianity

by Bruce Bawer

  Indeed, though I had managed to acquaint myself, in a spotty way, with American religious history, I came out of graduate school with what I now recognize as a crude, essentially secular vision of Christianity and its place in history. And nothing was more crude—and skewed—than my vision of Protestant fundamentalism. If I had been asked about fundamentalism back then, I would have said that it was a backward faith characterized by biblical literalism and horror of modern science, and that the 1925 trial of John T. Scopes for teaching evolution had marked the beginning of its end. That trial was depicted, of course, in Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's 1955 play Inherit the Wind. Virtually all of us nonlegalistic Christian and secular kids were given that play to read in high school. Most of us came to it knowing next to nothing about religion, fundamentalist or otherwise—and most of us came away from it having absorbed its message that fundamentalism was on the wrong side of history. When we went on to college, we were taught to speak and write as if nobody believed in religion anymore, at least not educated Americans; many of us tried not to notice how thoroughly this notion was contradicted by the reality around us. We now lived, our professors explained, in a "post-Christian" society; religion, if not yet completely dead, was unquestionably on its way out. Certainly fundamentalism was over, or very close to it.

  Was any proposition ever so misguided? Nowadays, if I want to remind myself exactly how unsawy I was then about the state of fundamentalism, I need only recall my response when in 1972, at fifteen, I read "Trends," a science-fiction story by Isaac Asimov that was published in 1939 before the outbreak of World War II. In that story, a futuristic work set in the 1970s, Asimov imagines a world where the Second World War, beginning in 1940, has been followed by a politically reactionary era marked by a return to social conventions and "a swing toward religion." In 1973, a scientist named John Harmon plans to fly the first manned rocket ship. For this audacious aspiration, he is condemned by Otis Eldredge, a famed evangelist who sees advanced science and technology as things of the Devil.

  "Gifted with a golden tongue and a sulphurous vocabulary," Eldredge forms an organization called the League of the Righteous that soon wins great power. Eldredge boasts that "after the next election Congress will be his." Sabotaged by an Eldredge follower, Harmon's rocket ship explodes before takeoff. While Harmon proceeds to build another rocket ship, American society grows even more conservative: In the 1974 elections, Eldredge wins control of Congress and outlaws scientific research. But Harmon is sanguine, explaining to his friends that "We're going through a momentary reaction following a period of too-rapid advance." In 1978, following Eldredge's death, Harmon flies to the moon and returns to be proclaimed a hero by an America now weary of right-wing evangelicalism. "The pendulum," Harmon observes with satisfaction, "swung back again."

  Though I enjoyed Asimov's stories, "Trends" struck me as callow. Yes, I was impressed that a teenager in 1939 had foreseen a second world war within the year and space travel by the early 1970s. Yet I found ridiculous the idea that in the late twentieth century, reactionary evangelists could rise to political power. What could be more absurd?

  To be sure, there were still people like that nice old Jehovah's Witness, and still Roman Catholic kids who gleefully damned their Protestant friends to hell. There were also evangelists like Rex Humbard and Kathryn Kuhlman whom I glimpsed now and then on low-budget, paid-access Sunday-morning TV shows. But these people, most of them old and tired-looking, were the very definition of fringe leaders. They were back numbers, the last relics of a movement that had long since seen its glory days. After all, the big-scale religious revivals led by flamboyant characters like Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPher-son were ancient history. Weren't they? I had read with relish Sinclair Lewis's 1927 novel Elmer Gantry, about a crooked evangelist who soaked illiterate, superstitious rubes in the hinterlands, and I knew that that novel was a period piece, an artifact of a distant, more unsophisticated era. Wasn't it? And I had read the aforementioned Inherit the Wind, which made it perfectly clear what I and others of my generation were supposed to think of fundamentalism: It was a thing of the past, a thing that belonged in the past, and a thing that, to the extent that it still survived in remote rural pockets, was guaranteed to wither away and die.

  Yes, guaranteed. After all, these were the early 1970s. America was growing more liberal and secular by the minute. In South Carolina, my older Protestant relatives still attended church, but none of my first cousins did; in New York, most of our adult Catholic neighbors hadn't been to mass in years, and most of their kids—the very ones who had damned me to hell a few years earlier—had transferred to public high schools.

  For my part, though I hadn't been brought up as a regular churchgoer, and still hadn't been baptized, I had been raised to say my prayers at bedtime, and I still did so. But I felt no need for church. Institutional religion seemed on its way out, and this didn't bother me. Not once had I attended a church service that had given me anything of spiritual value. I had never been a belonger, anyway. If anyone had told me that a few years later I would stop saying my prayers altogether, I probably wouldn't have been too surprised. If anyone had told me that, after another decade or so, I would undergo a baptism and become a regular churchgoer, a church committee member, and a deliverer of sermons, I don't think I would have believed it.

  And what if I had been told that someday soon the most powerful figure in the Republican Party would be a preacher very much like Otis Eldredge who led a group very much like the League of the Righteous? I can't imagine how I would have reacted had I foreseen the Moral Majority (founded in 1979) and the Christian Coalition (1989). With shock? Terror? Of course I suffered from a malady that was nearly ubiquitous among secular people as well as nonlegalistic Christians: an almost utter ignorance of the real history of legalistic Christianity in America. For the fact is that in the mid-1920s, at the time of the Scopes trial, American fundamentalism, far from being on its deathbed, was barely in its infancy. Although fundamentalists called themselves traditional Christians, moreover, fundamentalist theology was not traditional at all, but was a relatively recent invention that had only begun to take shape in late nineteenth-century America as a fearful reaction to the human chaos of the Civil War and the spiritual chaos threatened by the theories of Darwin. The modern world wasn't killing fundamentalism off; on the contrary, the challenges, complexities, and pressures of modern American life were helping to drive more and more people out of mainline denominations and into the arms of fundamentalism.

  It would be a long time before I learned these things. By the time I did, Pat Robertson's name would be a household word.

  To look back over the last thirty years or so, and to compare my observations and experiences with what I now know to be the reality of America's religious past and present, is to recognize three things. One, that my understanding of American religion was astonishingly meager and misguided. Two, that I was not alone in this regard; on the contrary, I probably had a better grasp of religion in America when I was twelve than most adult Americans do today. Three, that for Americans to be ignorant of what is going on in their country's churches is dangerous. Had we been more knowledgeable about this subject, none of us would have been surprised by the rise of the Religious Right. Had we been more knowledgeable, we would have a better understanding of what made this rise possible, of how we should feel about this rise, and of what can and must be done about it. Had we been more knowledgeable, we would have been able to see the picture before us more clearly and to place it in its historical context. It is the purpose of this book both to clarify that picture and to provide that context—and to do so from the perspective of a concerned lay Christian who is equally discomfited by the notion of an America without Christianity and the notion of an American Christianity without love and logic.

  It doesn't pretend to be comprehensive, or to be the work of a professional theologian, church historian, or cleric. In fact, that's part of the point here. This book may be u
nderstood, quite simply, as one layperson's map of the roads down which his own questions about ultimate reality have led him; my hope is that it will be of some use to others as they make their own journeys. I bring to this book my own experiences as a writer, a poet, a baby boomer, a middle-class gay white male American with mixed regional loyalties and with both Protestant and Catholic antecedents, and my conviction that the category of religion to which twentieth-century Americans have found their way in increasing numbers—a religion whose public faces today include those of Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, James Dobson, and Jerry Falwell—is not a setting in which intelligent, serious people can expect to work out meaningful and responsible answers to ultimate questions. Nor is it something that the earliest followers of Jesus would have recognized as Christianity. I don't think it's an exaggeration, in fact, to suggest that if the first Christians were exposed to the rhetoric of Robertson, Reed, Dobson, Falwell, and company, they might well ask, in astonishment, "How did these vicious people manage to steal the name of Jesus?"

  * * *

  2

  "WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?"

  Another evangelist encounter. It's a warm, pleasant evening in early summer, 1996, and I've just given a reading at a Washington, D.C., bookstore with two writer friends. Joined by eight or nine others, friends of theirs and mine, we stroll down the balmy, tree-lined streets of the Dupont Circle neighborhood to a small Malayan restaurant where our group—all gay men—is shown to a sidewalk table.

  The conversation is convivial. Aside from me, a New Yorker, everyone lives and works in Washington; all but one are white; most belong to the city's political establishment. Animatedly, they discuss the latest political news and gossip.

  Flanking me at one end of the table are a friend who now works as a senator's speechwriter and his companion, a photographer. Unlike the others, most of whom are libertarian Republicans and (I assume) atheists or agnostics, the speechwriter and his companion are both liberal Democrats and Southern Baptists. The three of us are chatting when all at once a middle-aged black man appears at the far end of the table.

  "Hallelujah!" the man booms out in a voice as deep and mellifluous as James Earl Jones's. Our heads all jerk up. He's beaming. "Good evening, gentlemen!" he says. "Have you been saved?" As my Baptist friends and I exchange a look, the man begins to tell us about the love of Jesus, his eyes possessed by a visionary gleam. I notice that he holds a bunch of small tracts.

  Sitting closest to the man are one of my writer friends and his companion, an Asian-American who is our only non-Caucasian. This companion now addresses the evangelist politely but firmly: "Excuse me, we're having a conversation here."

  His expression unchanging, as if he doesn't even realize he's been spoken to, the evangelist preaches on. The writer's companion speaks to the evangelist more firmly. "Excuse me, sir, we're trying to have a conversation. Please leave."

  The evangelist remains oblivious. "Jesus loves you!" he booms out, extending a tract. The companion places his hand on the evangelist's wrist and says sharply, "No." Their eyes meet; the evangelist's expression doesn't change. "Get out of here right now!" the companion demands. "If you don't leave immediately we'll call the police."

  I glance at my speechwriter friend. I can tell from his expression that he's thinking what I'm thinking: that while the evangelist presumably lives in Washington, he plainly inhabits a different world than we do—namely, that of Washington's huge black underclass, which can sometimes seem invisible to Powertown's busy movers and shakers. I know further that the picture of a table full of relatively privileged men—none black and mostly Republicans—threatening police action against an African-American in downtown Washington, D.C., does not sit well with my Baptist friend.

  Yet the situation is extremely complicated. Everyone at the table is gay. How many of us were told repeatedly in our childhoods that God hates homosexuals and condemns them to hell? How many of us thus view Christianity as a destructive force, a threat to our hard-won wholeness and self-respect? Some of my dinner companions are Jewish. Two generations after the Holocaust, how do they feel about Christianity, about being evangelized? I have only just met the Asian-American, so I am clueless as to what memories and emotions may have led him to speak to the evangelist so firmly. No easy judgment is possible here—no easy judgment of anybody; there is no simple answer to the question of what is and isn't a proper way to behave in these circumstances, which are, like the present religious situation in the United States, a tangled web of politics, race, class, sexual orientation, and radical metaphysical divergence.

  As the evangelist moves away from the Asian-American and waves his tracts at the rest of us, my speechwriter friend reaches out a hand. "I'll take one," he says. So do his companion and I. "Jesus loves you," the evangelist says, still beaming, and moves along.

  As he does, my Baptist friends and I look down at our tracts. Each consists of four three-by-five-inch pages. "THOUSANDS OF DEGREES HOT!" scream out bright red uppercase letters on the first page. "AND NOT A DROP OF WATER." Beneath these words is a crude drawing in red and black of a menacing figure—plainly Satan— with a pointed mustache and beard; behind him are the tortured, screaming faces of people whose bodies are immersed in what is apparently the lake of fire described in the Book of Revelation as the destination of all unsaved souls. The tract's title is printed in huge letters: "THE BURNING HELL: TORTURED LOST SOULS BURNING FOREVER!"

  The inside pages are all text: "Jesus Christ believed in a BURNING HELL, that is why He left the Father's bosom and came to the world of sorrow. He left the streets of gold and the rejoicing of angels, to come to this earth to be crucified, so that you and I could escape THE BURNING HELL." The remainder of the text alternates between biblical quotations about hell and passages such as the following: "One day in HELL, you will not have to be bothered by some Christian trying to give you a gospel tract. . . . You will be crying, and begging for one drop of water to cool your scorching tongue. But it will be too late." The tract's last page gives the reader an opportunity to sign his or her name to the statement that he or she has now decided to accept Jesus Christ as savior and thus be spared the everlasting torments of hell.

  After the evangelist's repeated declarations of Jesus' love, my Baptist friends and I are a bit jolted by the tract's hellfire message. Recalling the otherworldly gleam in the evangelist's eyes, I feel toward him a mixture of irritation and pity, and I wonder: Does he really believe in a God for whom a signature on a tract would make the difference between an eternity of torture and of bliss? I suppose he does. In his own view, certainly, the man was performing an act of love. Nonetheless I find the tract offensive. Addressing the entire table, I say, "Well, I wish he were still here, so I could tell him what I think of this tract, and tell him what evangelism is and isn't about. You don't get people to become Christians by scaring them to death."

  Except for my Baptist friends, my dinner companions seem not to know how to reply to this comment. They're not believers in any religion, as far as I know, and they're not accustomed to sitting at dinner with people who are—or, at least, with people who talk about it. It occurs to me that if the evangelist had not appeared, the fact that anyone at the table is a believer would never have come up in conversation. In any event, as everyone else resumes talking about politics, my two Baptist friends and I continue to talk quietly about the evangelist and his tracts. "Maybe a Christianity that begins in fear," the photographer says hopefully, "can grow into a Christianity centered on love."

  I shake my head. "No. Fear isn't a solid foundation for any healthy relationship, let alone one with God. To embrace Jesus because you fear God's wrath is to misunderstand God entirely. In fact it's to embrace something, or someone, that isn't Jesus at all."

  That's what I believe. Yet it doesn't express the whole truth of the situation we've just experienced. For despite my discontent with the evangelist's methods, I'm keenly aware that he brought something to the table that it lacked. The twentieth-century
American theologian Paul Tillich distinguished between two ways of relating to the world that he labeled horizontal and vertical. To be horizontally oriented is to be preoccupied with the transitory— day-to-day events, fads and fashions, temporal successes and failures. By contrast, to be vertically oriented—or, as Tillich puts it, to be "infinitely concerned," to live "in the dimension of depth"—is to be drawn to the infinite, the transcendent. As far back as 1958, Tillich lamented that "man in our time has lost such infinite concern." In a Saturday Evening Post essay called "The Lost Dimension in Religion," Tillich wrote that