The Battle for God

We cannot be religious in the same way as our ancestors in the premodern conservative world, when the myths and rituals of faith helped people to accept limitations that were essential to agrarian civilization. We are now oriented to the future, and those of us who have been shaped by the rationalism of the modern world cannot easily understand the old forms of spirituality. We are not unlike Newton, of the first people in the Western world to be wholly imbued by the scientific spirit, who found it impossible to understand mythology. However hard we try to embrace conventional religion, we have a natural tendency to see truth as factual, historical, and empirical. Many have become convinced that if faith is to be taken seriously, its myths must be shown to be historical and capable of working practically with all the efficiency that modernity expects. An increasing number of people, especially in Western Europe, which has experienced such tragedy during the twentieth century, have rejected religion. . . As scientists would be the first to insist, rational logos cannot address questions of ultimate meaning that lie beyond the reach of empirical inquiry. Confronted with the genocidal horrors of our century, reason has nothing to say.

Hence, there is a void at the heart of modern culture. . .

Sermon:

My sister never calls. She doesn’t write anymore, either. The last time she moved she neglected to send us her new address and phone number. This year she didn’t even send a Christmas card. She hasn’t visited us in more than a decade. I had to get her latest address from my father. Now that my father has died, she will be harder to track down. She did go down to Texas to visit my father in the hospital before he died, but she declined to return for his memorial service. While she did not say so, I suspect it is because my father’s memorial service was in the Unitarian church in San Antonio, a church he had joined several years before he died. And, while she has never come right out and said so, I suspect that she has cut back her already sparse communication with me because I am a Unitarian Universalist minister.

You see, my sister is a Christian fundamentalist. Her husband is a fundamentalist minister. I think that from her perspective I was bad enough years ago when I had all these heretical ideas, but now that I go spreading them around and preaching them from a church pulpit I have become dangerous. From her point of view the best thing is to avoid contact with me. It’s sad.

I know that many of you face a similar situation with fundamentalist family or friends. I regularly hear stories of children in this congregation being told by their friends that they are going to hell if they don’t believe in Jesus. I hear stories from you of difficult and broken relationships with children, siblings, parents and extended family. For a fundamentalist, religion is a struggle for the fate of souls throughout eternity. For a modern fundamentalist, practicing one’s religion is also a matter of fighting a battle for God’s values in the political and cultural arenas. Life is a battle for God.

At the interpersonal level, relationships with family, friends and neighbors who are fundamentalists can be awkward. Estrangements can be unavoidable and heartbreaking.

At the social, cultural and political levels, the consequences of organized fundamentalism are frightening. In America today Christian fundamentalism is a powerful political and cultural force. In our schools they have been mounting a steady campaign for years. Christian fundamentalists are trying to get creationism taught as science, particularly under the new disguise of “intelligent design.” They attempt to get biblical teachings like the Ten Commandments posted and have long advocated school prayer. Christian fundamentalists have initiated and supported anti-gay ballot measures here in Colorado and across the country. A story in the Denver Post a couple of days ago reports that the Christian right will try to amend the Colorado constitution next year to ban marriage and civil unions of same sex couples. And, barring some sort of miracle, they will succeed here like they have been succeeding across the country. Most Christian fundamentalists believe history will soon end and that Jesus will return. Many of them believe that first there will be a “rapture” in which the faithful suddenly and simultaneously are whisked into heaven. This bizarre belief, held by tens of millions, leads to an utter indifference to preserving the environment, protecting endangered species or living in a sustainable way. If the earth is about to end, who cares? Some welcome war in the Middle East because they believe it will hasten the second coming.

But fundamentalism is not just a phenomenon of reactionary American Protestants. Militant Islamic fundamentalists have been waging war on modernity across the world. With the promise of paradise and the certainty that they are holy warriors doing God’s will, Islamic fundamentalists have killed thousands in suicide attacks. The attacks of 9/11 were their most spectacular success, but it is a rare day that some poor misguided Muslim does not blow him or her self up and kill and maim others. Fundamentalist Islamic regimes like the Taliban in Afghanistan and Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran have come to power.

Fundamentalist Jews, especially in Israel, insist that Jews must seize more land and must resist efforts to share land with Palestinians. They see themselves as defending God given rights to biblical lands. Their rigid and uncompromising stand, a stand they see as ordained by God, has contributed to the conflict and violence in that region.

Author Karen Armstrong has chronicled the history of fundamentalism in Christianity, Islam and Judaism in her best selling book, The Battle for God (a title so appropriate I borrowed it for this sermon). The parallels among the fundamentalist movements in the three great monotheistic traditions are strong. Each of them arose as a reaction against the modern, secular world. Each of these movements seeks to return to a mythic golden age of purity. Each movement is sustained by educational institutions that indoctrinate believers — Bible colleges for Christians, reactionary yeshivas for Jews and militant madrasahs for Muslims. Each of these movements sees itself as surrounded by a hostile and evil world. All fundamentalists see the world of scientific rationality, with its values of freedom of inquiry and its refusal to accept old myths as fact as a threat. Each sees itself as defending truth and virtue against powerful satanic forces. These movements need an enemy. Without an enemy there is no urgency, no struggle, no identity.
I believe that there is a fundamentalist mentality that extends beyond the bounds of religious fundamentalism. I remember some years ago being struck by the powerful parallels between Christian fundamentalism and Marxist ideologues.

Fundamentalists, whether religious or political (and the distinction between the religious and the political begin to blur when talking about fundamentalists) believe that there is a truth. The truth is in the book, whether the book is the Christian Bible, the Hebrew Bible, the Koran or the Sayings of Chairman Mao. The sacred text is to be interpreted in one way, the way that the group’s teachers say is the correct way. All of them believe we live in perilous times of historic, even cosmic, significance. Fundamentalists have a special animosity toward those in their own tradition who disagree. Fundamentalist Christians are especially incensed at those who interpret their Bible differently; Maoists were especially disdainful of other communists who disagreed, typically calling them names such as counterrevolutionary revisionist swine and dupes of capitalism.

I also believe that each of these rigid ideologies is based on fear. All fundamentalists, of whatever type, fear uncertainty. They fear change. They fear knowledge. All the religious ones fear women. They fear ambiguity and uncertainty. They want and need solid answers.

One of Karen Armstrong’s important insights is that religious fundamentalisms are actually profoundly modern movements. That is, they are not merely holdovers from a distant past. While many of their beliefs are very traditional, as movements they are reactions against the modern world.

How are we to live in such a world? What drives so many people, millions of them, into such extreme ideologies? How are we to respond?

I believe we need to distinguish between how we respond to individuals who are fundamentalists and how we respond to organized fundamentalism. In the case of individuals, we need to practice our values of respect, understanding and compassion. We need to remember that most fundamentalists are deeply afraid. They fear a world that appears to have no meaning and no hope, a world that threatens family and faith.

We need to remember that it is a very different thing today to believe in the virgin birth, the physical resurrection, creation in six days, miracles, and all the rest. Three or four hundred years ago the vast majority of people, even educated people, accepted this. But to believe such things today is an act of desperation and denial. Today we know about the age of the universe and its size. We know about the age of the earth. Everything from paleontology to molecular biology points to the evolution of life. So fundamentalism today, especially in a nation like ours, is not simply the uncritical acceptance of inherited belief. Our family and friends who are fundamentalists are fleeing from the secular world and the world of reason in order to cling to something that offers certainty, comfort and meaning. Imagine what it is like, and a few of us here today can remember what it is like, to feel the need to deny and explain away Hubble Telescope photos showing galaxies ten billion light years away. Imagine how threatening it is to visit a natural history museum, or to take a college course in geology, anthropology or comparative religion. Fundamentalism requires willful, determined, disciplined ignorance. Our fundamentalist neighbors may have a veneer of certainty. Beneath it is nagging, persistent, terrifying doubt. With individuals we must be respectful, compassionate, understanding and patient.

However, I would also suggest to you that we must respond very differently to organized fundamentalism. Organized fundamentalism of all kinds is a real danger. The last things we should be with organized fundamentalism are patient, compassionate, respectful and understanding. In dealing with organized fundamentalism we need to be suspicious, determined, aggressive and confrontational. Organized fundamentalism is dangerous. It tends towards violence. It breeds hatred. It kills people.

One of the recurrent themes in history is how progressive people, people like you and me, consistently underestimate the capacity of ideologues to do violence or deny rights of others. Most Jews in Europe in the 1930’s simply could not believe that the German people were capable of anything like the Holocaust. Who would have thought, generations after the public and national humiliation of fundamentalism in the Scopes trial in Tennessee, that we would be fighting to defend the teaching of evolution in public schools? Few saw, twenty or thirty years ago, the terrible violence latent in Islamic fundamentalism. We religious liberals look for the good in people. Usually this is an endearing quality. It is a virtue when we deal with individuals. It is also true that organized evil always seems to catch us by surprise. Our sunny optimism too often makes us blind to the power of evil, especially organized, violent ignorance that preys on people’s fears.

In confronting organized fundamentalism, whether it be al Qaeda or Focus on the Family, we need to be relentless, resourceful, cunning and vocal. That does not mean we have to be nasty, mean spirited, or vicious. But it does mean we have to enter the arena of public discourse and that in that arena we must be determined, persuasive and passionate advocates.

And while we need to be vigilant and vocal, I believe we also need to listen deeply to the millions upon millions of fundamentalists in our world. The power of fundamentalism says something important about our world. I think we need to hear the human confusion and pain that lies beneath their ideologies. While their ideas may be ridiculous, the fact that so many cling to them is a symptom of something gone tragically wrong in modern life.
The power of fundamentalist ideologies speaks compellingly to the human needs that reason and secularism cannot fill. Modernity tears down the past and leaves a gaping psychic hole. Many people experience the changes of modern life, changes made possible by the stunning success of science and instrumental rationality, as creating a world devoid of meaning, a world in which they no longer know their place, a world that feels hostile. Creating meaning in life and connection to purposes that transcend our individual lives has always been the role of religion. Religion’s mythical stories expressed a vision of humanity as the center of the world, as the crown of creation, as created in God’s image and as loved by God.

The great folly of fundamentalism is to take religious myths—myths like creation and Easter—and to treat them as if they were fact. Fiction and poetry can express deep emotional truths without being factually accurate. Christian fundamentalists, by treating myth as fact, produce bad science and bad religion. By getting caught up in narrow legalisms intended for another time, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists foster violence and oppression.

Fundamentalist movements seek to return to a golden past that never was. The real challenge for us, however, is to create a religious vision that speaks to the deep human need for meaning and the deep to connect that which transcends us all. Science and knowledge, for all their power, do not speak to that deep hunger. Before questions of ultimate meaning science is silent, as it is silent on matters of ethics and aesthetics. Science is about what is, not about what should be.

Our task is to create a religious vision that both welcomes human knowledge and feeds our deep hunger for meaning. We need to build upon the great religious traditions, but not be confined by practices and doctrines created for other people living in other times. It is not enough to oppose the reactionary agendas of fundamentalists, though we need to do that.

The great challenge is to create a compelling alternative—an alternative that feeds the mind, the heart and the spirit. This is our challenge as a religious movement, and it is a challenge we face together with progressive elements of all the great traditions.

If we fail, the battle for God will intensify. If we fail to create an alternative, the human casualties of the battle for God will continue to mount.
We must join hands with the millions of others who seek peace and seek a vision that includes all of humanity. Let us commit ourselves to working to create a religious alternative to the battle for God. We dare not fail. We must not fail. Amen.