Stealing Jesus: how fundamentalism betrays Christianity

by Bruce Bawer

  By later Roman Catholic standards, then, the early Christians would all have been considered apostates destined for hell. The Roman Catholic Church has tried to skirt this problem by proclaiming that new doctrines are examples of "progressive revelation." "It is possible," wrote the nineteenth-century Catholic historian Philip Schaff, "for the church to be in possession of a truth and to live upon it, before it has come to be discerned in her consciousness." In other words, the early Christians all really believed in doctrines that weren't developed till centuries later; they just didn't know they believed in them.

  This bizarre dodge notwithstanding, the fact remains that the Roman Catholic Church's leadership has exhibited for centuries a ferocious need to systematize the faith in ever-greater detail and to demand total allegiance to it. This kind of faith, of course, is utterly different in kind from that of the early Christians; for it is a faith primarily denned not by vertical experience but by an assent in the horizontal plane to a set of propositions. I was amazed as a teenager when I discovered that Roman Catholic friends who regularly attended mass didn't make any attempt to get into the experience of it; the very idea was alien to them. They had been taught that they had to show up every week and take Communion; it didn't matter if, while they did so, their minds were on yesterday's TV show or tomorrow's ball game. As long as you performed the act, you had carried out your side of the deal, and God would carry out his. A deal: That's what it was, not an experience; a horizontal event, not a vertical one. In this kind of religion, the basic idea is that the average believer is expected to follow rules laid down for behavior on the horizontal plane, while the church takes care of the vertical.

  That's not a good thing. Which is not to dismiss theology. Theology is valuable to the extent that it represents the effort of an individual to capture his or her experience of God. Honest, intelligent attempts of this kind can be of value to all believers as they, too, seek to understand and articulate their own experience of God. Theology is bad to the extent that it is prescriptive and official; theology that forces Christians to deny their own their allegiance to a set of propositions that may run contrary to that experience is destructive of true spirituality. At its worst, indeed, such theology can deprive Christians of access to the vertical dimension and keep them yoked to the horizontal. Further, such theology can encourage them to think that some of their horizontal experiences are in fact experiences of God. (It is people with this kind of horizontal faith, for example, who rush to see weeping Madonna paintings and the like, thinking that this is how one encounters God.)

  The Roman Catholic Church has always represented itself as being in sole possession of the truths of the soul. Yet during John Paul II's papacy, the church has punished some of its most brilliant members for seeking the truth when that search has taken them, as it was bound to do if they were being honest with themselves, afield in any way from official doctrine. A notable case is that of Hans Kung, who helped shape the theological agenda of Vatican II but who in later years, on orders from John Paul II, was dismissed from a theology professorship at a Catholic university. It is sometimes said that churches that insist on theological rigidity are devoted to truth; but in fact such a posture reflects not a genuine concern with truth but a desire for control, order, discipline, and a false show of unanimity. A church that really cares about truth gives its most intelligent communicants free rein—as responsible scientific institutions do—to explore, to examine, to share their insights, and to challenge, correct, and learn from the insights of others.

  There have, of course, always been Christians who took on the institutional church, placing love above law. Supreme among these, in pre-Reformation history, was Francis of Assisi. As Jesus had challenged the Pharisees to resist institutional, legalistic thinking and to give priority to God's commandment to love, so Francis challenged the pope and his bishops to do the same. In this regard, Francis was a forerunner of the great Protestant reformers, who, seeing the Roman Catholic Church as irredeemably committed to legalism, broke away from it in hopes of establishing less legalistic bodies of worship; the difference is that Francis remained a loyal member of the church and never rejected its authority to speak for God, to set laws, and to establish doctrines. Born late in 1181 or early in 1182, Francis was a worldly youth who dressed stylishly and spent his father's money on amusements. At twenty-five, soon after setting out for the Crusades, he heard a voice telling him to return home. He did, and began to dress plainly and to give his good clothes—and money—to beggars. At first mocked and stoned in Assisi, he came to be tolerated, then respected. Like Christ, he began to draw disciples to his side, a development that wasn't part of his original intent. The Franciscan order just happened. Why? Part of the reason lies in his simplicity of life, thought, and expression. His "Canticle of the Sun" (now considered the first great poem in Italian), his letters, and the rules he wrote for his order reflect a firm and uncomplicated conviction that human beings were put on earth to praise, serve, and rejoice. As Kung has noted, Francis is of all medieval figures the one with whose view of Christ today's Christians can most readily identify. No intellectual giant, no maker of systematic doctrine, he appeals to many Christians' antipathy for abstruse formulations. His warning that knowledge could be self-destructive—a warning motivated by his belief that theological discourse had severed the clergy from God's pure message of love and from the laypeople they were called to serve—speaks loudly to the anti-intellectualism of the average man or woman in the average pew.

  For scholars, this aspect of Francis can be troubling. Yet it was the farthest Francis could go in challenging the idea of institutional orthodoxy. In the time and place in which he lived, the notion that theology didn't necessarily have to be laid down by the church hierarchy, and that every individual with a mind should use it to be his or her own theologian, as it were, wasn't even on the table. In practice, of course, Francis was his own theologian—but he was not a systematizer, and was certainly not an imposer of theology on others. "In whatever way you think you will best please our Lord God and follow in His footprints and in His poverty," he wrote one of his companions, "take that way with the Lord God's blessing." In saying this, the most popular of Christian saints was anticipating the most radical of Protestant theological tenets: the idea that in matters of faith, individual conscience is paramount. Francis even saw the heathen as his brothers—a novel idea in thirteenth-century Europe, where Crusaders were promised heavenly rewards for slaughtering infidels. Traveling in 1219 to Egypt, he bravely crossed the Crusaders' battle lines to meet the Egyptian sultan, Malek El-Kamil, whom he sought to convert and whose nephew he accompanied to a mosque, where he prayed, saying, "God is everywhere."

  Francis exercised what is nowadays called prophetic obedience. Though he disobeyed ecclesiastical authority from time to time, he never did so without the firm conviction that he was obeying a higher authority—namely, God's law of love. (It seems reasonable, incidentally, to suggest that Francis's reluctance to produce a rule for his order grew out of an admirable disinclination to impose on his followers any theological or behavioral test.) For all his rebelliousness, however, Francis remained a loyal Roman Catholic who accepted the right of his church's hierarchy to formulate and enforce doctrine. It took Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and the other leaders of the Protestant Reformation to deny this right. To be sure, they did not abandon the idea of institutional orthodoxy. Luther's followers were obliged to accept the doctrines outlined in a document called the Augsburg Confession; Calvin's were equally compelled to embrace the Westminster Confession.

  A third important Protestant tradition was somewhat different in this regard. Anglicanism grew out of the unique historical circumstances of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, which was marked by a powerful sense of national identity and whose populace was split between Catholics and Protestants. Long before the Protestant Reformation, the English church was notorious for its sense of independence. Finally severed from Rome unde
r Henry VIII— whose principal opposition was not to Catholic doctrine but to papal authority (and whose principal motive for the break with Rome, as everyone knows, was his wish to divorce the first of his six wives)— the Anglican Church took shape theologically under Henry's three children: Edward VI, a firm Protestant who reigned for six years, long enough to institute the first Book of Common Prayer, a decidedly Protestant document; Mary I, a devout Catholic who reigned for five years, long enough to reinstate certain Catholic practices that Edward had proscribed; and finally the pragmatic Elizabeth, who in her forty-four-year reign labored brilliantly to forge not only a society but an established church that was broad enough to include all but the most extreme Catholics and Protestants.

  The result was—and is—a church of astonishing theological breadth. But it is not breadth in a lax, lazy, anything-goes sense. The Anglican Church, when truest to its own theological traditions, views the mind not as a potential instrument of the Devil but as a gift of God. And it takes seriously the idea of the community of faith as a context within which people from different backgrounds and with varying perspectives can openly share their experiences of God, can attend to one another in a spirit of love, and can thereby gain insights that may help every member of the community to move somewhat closer to God's truth. Defenders of strict church orthodoxy argue that any organization has the right to make its own rules and to say who is qualified to be a member and who isn't; part of the genius of Anglicanism is the recognition that the church, if it takes itself seriously as the body of Christ, is not just another organization.

  This understanding of the nature of the church can be traced back to the theologian Richard Hooker (1554—1600), who maintained that corporate spiritual truths could best be arrived at as a consequence of institutional openness and tolerance for breadth of belief. He also stressed the importance of distinguishing between essential core doctrines that everyone shared and inessential, peripheral doctrines on which people could respectfully differ.

  The Anglican theologian John E. Booty notes several key ingredients of Anglicanism that derive from Hooker. In all these aspects, Anglicanism contrasts sharply with today's Protestant fundamentalism. If Anglicanism has, in Booty's words, a "positive attitude toward God," who is seen as a merciful deity desiring "the salvation of all people and of all creation," fundamentalism focuses not on a God of love but on a God of wrath and judgment who will grant salvation to the few; if Anglicanism emphasizes "the holy, the beautiful, the good and the true," fundamentalism is indifferent to beauty, places less value on goodness than on doctrinal correctness, and upholds the "true" not as something to be sought through honest inquiry but as something that, having already been definitively laid out by preachers and "reference Bibles," is to be mindlessly and uncritically embraced; if Anglicanism believes in "every Christian's responsibility for the welfare of every other living being," fundamentalism encourages believers to attend to their own souls (and those of their nearest and dearest) and not to care overmuch for the welfare of others (especially nonfundamentalists).

  Anglicanism is not utterly without dogma. For centuries its doctrine was spelled out in the thirty-nine (originally forty-two) "Articles of Religion." Yet these Articles were worded in such a way as to strike an acceptable balance among Lutheran, Calvinistic, and Zwinglian beliefs and to be acceptable to all but the most die-hard Roman Catholics, at one extreme, and, at the other, the radical Anabaptists (who, like their Baptist posterity today, rejected infant baptism and affirmed the "believer's baptism"). Confessional orthodoxy has never been an Anglican priority.

  Nor do I mean to deny that like every other major religious institution, the Anglican Church and its American counterpart, the Episcopal Church, have terrible blots on their histories; among other things, both churches have, to an extraordinary degree, always been fruitful breeding grounds for snobbism and hypocrisy. Yet one must distinguish the church at its worst from the theological system at its best. And the fact is that, of all the major institutional approaches to doctrine that grew out of the Protestant revolt, the Anglican theological method most surely commends itself to those who seek an intellectually solid, broadly inclusive foundation for a true Church of Love.

  The Anglican Church, of course, had been the established national church of most of the colonists who first settled North America. Yet if the history of English-speaking Canada has been marked by Anglican-style religious amity, the United States has, since its inception, been a country of powerful sectarian tensions and is today far more torn between legalistic Christianity and secularism than any nation in western Europe. These tensions can be traced to the conflict between the two very different worldviews that predominated in colonial America and in the young Republic. One of these worldviews was the Puritanism brought to America by the early Massachusetts settlers. Despite their rejection of Catholicism, the Puritans mirrored the Roman emphasis on orthodoxy and authority; and that emphasis has been retained by their twentieth-century spiritual heirs. The first Puritans came to America in 1630 less because they sought religious freedom than because they considered themselves to be God's Elect and saw the virgin continent as a second Eden where they could be American Adams who, this time, would not succumb to Satan's temptations.

  Many of them also identified the New World with the postapocalyptic New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation. Their apocalyptic emphasis and their conviction that America is somehow special in God's sight live on today in the hearts of their legalistic heirs.

  The Puritans were Calvinists, which means, among much else, that they considered some people to be Elect—destined from birth for heaven—and some not. As Karen Armstrong observes, God "did not seem to imbue them [Puritans] with either happiness or compassion. Their journals and autobiographies show that they were obsessed with predestination and a terror that they would not be saved. Conversion became a central preoccupation, a violent, tortured drama. . . . Often the conversion represented a psychological abreaction, an unhealthy swing from extreme desolation to elation." The Puritans placed a "heavy emphasis on hell and damnation"; Satan "seemed as powerful a presence in their lives as God.... at its worst, the Puritan god inspired anxiety and a harsh intolerance of those who were not among the elect." All these attributes of Puritanism—the agonized preoccupation with the threat of hellfire and the drama of conversion, the overwhelming sense of the reality of Satan and of a wrathful God, and the profound sense of distance and opposition between the saved and the unsaved—remain, to this day, identifying characteristics of legalistic Christianity in America.

  If Anglicanism stressed the love of God for all humankind, the Puritans, rebelling not only against the Roman papacy but against Anglicanism's generally congenial image of God (as well as what they saw as its worldliness, insufficient attention to sin, and high-toned worship), introduced into Christianity an extreme focus on divine wrath. Fearing God's retribution against wicked man, they saw European culture as being too tolerant of evil and sought to establish a despotic theocracy. The Puritans' censorious attitude toward the London theater is replicated in the attitude of legalists today toward Hollywood movies and network TV. In many ways, indeed, the present American "culture war" between secular humanists and legalists replays the seventeenth-century English conflict between Anglican breadth and Puritan narrowness. Like many of today's American legalists, the English Puritans warned that cultural depravity would bring down God's punishment on the nation and sought political power so that they might prohibit certain behaviors. In 1642, after the Puritans won control of Parliament, it was decreed that in order to "appease and avert the wrath of God,... public stage plays shall cease and be forborne." Laws were also passed against swearing, ■which included saying such things as "God is my witness."

  The second seminal influence on American culture was that of the Enlightenment philosophy of the French Revolution, with its emphasis on individual experience, reason, reflection, and the possibility of positive change. This philosophy strongly influe
nced America's founding fathers and helped shape the scientific method, the twentieth-century democratic sensibility, and the category of religious belief (popular among eighteenth-century intellectuals) known as deism, which dismissed revealed religion and divine intervention while affirming the existence of a loving Creator. (The deists' denial of Jesus' divinity became the distinguishing characteristic of the Unitarian Church, to which many educated nineteenth-century New Engenders belonged.)

  Central to the Religious Right's political program is the claim—made repeatedly by Pat Robertson and other leaders—that the United States was founded as a "Christian nation." Consider the following:

  • The right-wing American Family Association sponsors a nationwide student group whose members subscribe to a covenant declaring, "I deserve to know what our founders taught, how they lived and the Christian principles upon which America was founded."

  • At the second presidential debate in 1996, which followed a "town hall" format, a minister asked Bob Dole the following question: "This great nation has been established by the founding fathers who possessed a very strong Christian beliefs [sic] and godly principles. If elected president of the United States, what could you do to return this nation to these basic principles?"

  • Pat Robertson, in his book The New Millennium, contrasts the American Revolution, which "produced a constitution and a government based on biblical principles of Christianity," with the French Revolution, which "was, at its core, anti-Christian." Among those that Robertson quotes approvingly is Gary Amos, a faculty member at Regent University (founded by Robertson), whose book Defending the Declaration argues that the Declaration's framers were indeed Christians according to Protestant legalists' narrow conception of the term.