the future of faith: Globalization vs. fundamentalism, Yoda vs. al Qaida

“Give us this day our daily faith, but deliver us from beliefs.”

-Aldous Huxley, Island

Opening his last chapter of The Future of Faith, Harvey Cox offers this eccentric quote from Huxley’s sketch on the future of religion in a science world.  It is overstated to be sure, but the quote captures something that, like it or not, we are seeing in the world of religions today.  The growing emphases on Spirit and Justice are disrupting the preeminence which dogmatic belief has held on the religious landscape, especially in the last century.

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Part 1: Creeds crafting orthodoxy and the Gospel of Thomas

Part 2: 20th Century American Fundamentalism

Globalization: Humility, or pluralism and fundamentalism

Globalization breeds crisis of faith as contact with the Other suggests we may not understand as much as we previously thought.  A mature reaction is humility and a desire to dialogue and learn.  But more commonly a reaction of ambiguous syncretism or reactionary dogmatic fundamentalism is taken instead.  This is the history of the late 20^th century, as earlier 20^th century trends of theological liberalism and fundamentalism reached a crux to the point that people took sides without realizing they were even doing so..

To explain this, Cox highlights the remarkable resurgence in Islam over the last century.  There are a variety of explanations for this trend: the rise of education and low job market in the middle east, the world’s oil addiction, the failure of either socialism or free market capitalism to satisfy needs.  But the most likely reason, Cox argues, is the way in which change (i.e. globalization) breeds in people a need for stability (i.e. tradition, religion).  To take it a step further, Islam has always had a care for the poor as a central pillar, and so the growing humanitarian obsession merged well with a religio-political system that required the poor to to be taken care of in order to reach paradise.

The rise of lay leadership, to the hierarchy’s chagrin

On top of this, we see a phenomenon in Islam that has congruent strains in every major religion: the rise of the lay semi-clergy.  Notably, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism are showing trends toward less ordination, less officiation, and more work outside the bounds of the dominant system.  In American Christianity, we see this in para-church ministries such as Young Life, the Passion conferences, the Salvation Army, or churches planted without denominational support or seminary-schooled clergy.  There is no longer an assumed need for official sanction.  The reaction from the religious systems of the world loosing control is violent.  A brand new Buddhist temple, beautifully constructed into the side of Mt. Fugi is destroyed because it houses a lay sect.  Christian priests are excommunicated.  Muslim’s have been killed for stepping outside the watch of the imams.

Education breeds doubt and atheism

Cox goes on to describe a far more hidden fact, a truth that philosophers and theologians have known since Plato but that few choose to articulate: people want a solid, unquestionable narrative with which to frame life and ethics.  Faith does not do well if its subscribers do not feel absolutely sure of their fundamentals.  Even in the highly functional societies of northern Europe need a common, almost religious, framing ethic regardless of the success of atheism.  In the Bible churches of the US south, we see an example of this in the way that pastors are reluctant to teach their congregations of the contradictions and problems with Biblical inerrancy that they learned in seminary.  People hate that sense of not being sure.

History inarguably shows that a society’s rise of education corresponds to a rise in atheism.  Even when atheism does not dominate, a rise in intellect still threatens the clergy-class because the lay become aware of problems in the faith.  People learn, and then they doubt.  There doubts can no longer be assuaged with pompous assurances from a cleric, because the doubter can google the question on his mind and know more about it in a short 10 minutes than the cleric learned in 5 years of grad school.  So at best, education threatens the religious establishment, if not religion itself.

Crisis point: liberalism leads to fundamentalism leads to emergence

The last trend Cox sees in the future of faith is the sharpening and marginalization of fundamentalism.  To look at this, Cox highlights al Qaida, a group that emerged in response to what it saw as the secularization of governments founded in Islam.  Intelligence analysts tell us that al Qaida’s goal is not first and foremost to hurt America and non-Muslim states.  Al Qaida wants Islamic renewal, and after witnessing the trend of impassioned young Muslims rising whenever a foreign state intervenes in domestic affairs, al Qaida saw an opportunity to coax America to attack.  Hence 9/11; we each needed the other to attack.  For a few years, their desire for the US to attack worked well and surged their ranks.  Fundamentalist movements are well equipped to draw true believers.  But the plan backfired, as fundamentalist tactics warped by a good guys vs. bad guys worldview tend to do, and by 2005, we saw al Qaida’s plummeting esteem in the Muslim world.  The became the laughable sideliners, angrily fighting a loosing battle.  An American national intelligence agency reported in 2008 that al Qaida was being alienated from the broader Muslim world due to its “indiscriminate killing and inattention to the practical problems of poverty, unemployment, and education.”

Cox makes a startling comparison to Islam’s extremist wing to what he says is the American Christian version: the Religious Right’s desire for a “Christian nation.”  In Africa, it comes in the form of bishops splitting communions over women and gay clergy.  In Israel, it is the formation of a religious “Torah State.”  In India, the Barata Janata party wants to “Hinduize” India.  It is a consistent fundamentalist reaction we see in every major religion to discomfort with globalization.  At some point, globalization and growing literacy/education forces a community to a crisis point at which they will choose either mechanistic and reactionary fundamentalism, or a rupture into faith beyond the traditional bounds of beliefs they have known.  My fear for the Church is that so many choose fundamentalism because they mistakenly feel doing so is loyal to Jesus and the Bible.  It is a very deceptive myth that shrouds fear and misinformation as loyalty.

Jedi Prophet Yoda

The great sage Yoda once said, “Fear is the path to the Dark Side.  Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate… leads to suffering. “

There is much fear disguising itself as loyalty in all the fundamentalist movements.  It thrives on misinformation and an unwillingness to learn from anyone outside its own camp.  And it is a losing battle.  Fundamentalism will never die, but it will continue to be marginalized, screaming from the sidelines that somebody else stole their things and they want them back.

The Future of Faith

In the end Cox is very hopeful for the future of faith, as am I.  A growing emphasis on Spirit and Justice is on the rise, and fundamentalism is on the decline.  Faith, with its loyal prophets of education and atheism, are growing strong.  Just as creeds emerged from the spheres of authority over a vast body that could have cared less, we see less emphasis on lists of beliefs for inclusion (and theologians like myself are far more interested in a wider sphere of learning).  There is less hierarchy, patriarchy, and dogmatism.  Faiths are rediscovering their founder’s philosophies.  The Church is rediscovering “Gospel” as Jesus defined it (“the Kingdom of God is at hand”) rather than the way 20^th century fundamentalism defined it (“believe these things and you will get to heaven”).  As Rabbi Gamaliel once urged the Sanhedrin to cease oppressing an emerging Jewish sect called “the Way of Jesus” because if it was from God it could not be stopped, I am convinced this new turn of the Spirit and Justice will not be stopped.  It will be excommunicated, slandered, oppressed, and martyred, but it will not be stopped.

a brief survey of American Fundamentalism (“the Future of Faith” by Harvey Cox, part 2)

Fundamentalists can be scary. If you spook them, they will lash out at you and then tell you god told them to do it. You have to be nice to then and not show interest in science while they convert you. And nothing spooks them more than finding out they aren’t quite the original faith that they fashion themselves to be. They are every bit legit, as sure as Evolution is a lie of Satan, and they will tell you so.

In The Future of Faith, Harvey Cox is not afraid to take on Christianity’s chief revisionists: American Fundamentalists.

Seriously, by “Fundamentalists,” I don’t just mean someone who is ultra-conservative, anti-thinking, and pro-blowing-stuff-up. We all know that’s true for some of them, but really, I use the term “Fundamentalist” here in the technical sense that its own members in the past defined themselves as, referring to a list of non-negotiable beliefs as well as a mindset that is often implied by such an outlook. I don’t mean it in a pejorative sense. I’ve attended and served in several Evangelical churches, and while Fundamentalism may be something I no longer identify with personally, it is the mother of my faith; and in that sense I owe Fundamentalism my very faith. So it is a part of my faith’s past that I hold lovingly.

The History of Fundamentalists… who seldom know they are Fundamentalists

The Christian Fundamentalist movement can trace its roots to late 19^th and early 20^th century counter-reformations that emerged in response to theological liberalism at the time. Scholarship, as well as trendy notions that Christianity would dissolve into a single command (Love) and no more, upset the religious commons and they began to respond with a high dependence on safe beliefs. In 1910, a movement indignant at what they saw as the syncretism of accommodation began to publish a pamphlet called The Fundamentals, and widely circulated this pamphlet. They gallantly took the name Fundamentalists for themselves, using it not as a negative term, but instead with intent to show fidelity to the Faith. The Five Fundamentals chosen were 1) the divine inspiration and total inerrancy of the Bible, 2) the Virgin Birth of Christ, 3) the penal substitutionary atonement of Christ, 4) the bodily resurrection of Christ, and 5) the imminent second coming of Christ in glory. Each was picked do to particular battle being waged at the time with the academy. So inherent to the birth of Fundamentalism, as inflammatory as this may seem, is a sort of anti-intellectualism which the movement was birthed in response as. History, science, textual criticism, and the academy that pushed these things, all became suspect to the fundamentalist. And Cox notes significantly, not one of those imperative Fundamentals had anything at all to do with the life and teaching of Christ.

A mere fifty years before (mid 19^th century) had seen the rise of language such as “accept Christ as your personal Savior” in popular terminology. And now with the paramount importance of (these 5) beliefs over actions, Fundamentalism was a functional and coherent converting machine, though dooming itself to have little to say on the life and teaching of Christ.

They sought to “get back to the teachings of the early church,” all the while loathing the scholarship trying to shed light on the variant and amorphous teachings of the early church. But a revisionist history will serve a group quite well so long as the collective operates by the narrative. Each fundamental was a response to liberalism: inerrancy countered growing application of historical research and literary methods; virgin birth and resurrection countered Christ being painted as a mere moral exemplar; immanent second coming was meant to cease ideas that man was coming closer to bringing the Kingdom of God to earth. The second coming fundamental inaugurated the 20^th century American church’s obsession with novel and localized (both in time and history) interpretation of isolated texts in Daniel and Ezekiel, combined with Revelation, into a belief that we are on the precipice of the Apocalypse. It’s a popular misunderstanding of prophecy and eschatology. This belief in a Rapture and coming 7 year Tribulation represents well the way in which a revisionist history (and worldview resistant to others) can permeate a subculture to the point that believers presume this is only the conservative, orthodox belief and that anything contrary is new. But this was just as fundamental as the rest.

Harvey Cox makes a compelling case that while non-fundamentalist sects of religions have made great strides in interfaith dialogue (always a good thing), this has often come at the expense of intrafaith dialogue. As it is suspect of syncretism at any inter/intrafaith dialogue which does not aim at conversion, Fundamentalism has been similarly cut off from conversation with the broader church, to the detriment of all. This dichotomy has created on one side an elitist Christianity unwilling to take Fundamentalists seriously, and on the other a Fundamentalist Christianity which sees itself as a victim struggling against the forces of evil (though evil may come under the façade of a more liberal Christian) in its endless battle to get back to the good ole’ days of pure belief (which are themselves a myth).

In his chapter entitled “Get Them into the Lifeboat,” Cox walks us through his own phase as a fundamentalist. It was a moment of nostalgia for me. I grew up Southern Baptist until my family moved to a non-denominational church when I was 13. And though I was vaguely aware that there were specific dates at which the Baptist or Non-Denom movements started, we tacitly just knew that we had the “real” faith, the one that had been around since the very beginning. Cox had a similar stint with Fundamentalism, exposed through a college campus ministry, doing door-to-door evangelism, and getting people saved. It began to loose sway for him, much as it did for me, as he grew in awareness of textual criticism, the problematic history of Christianity and the text, and the general threat that questioning seemed to pose. The threat taken at honest, seeking questions was the greatest single destabilize in my own fundamentalism.

With these fundamentals nailed down for the true believer, Cox quotes the great evangelist Dwight Moody who said, “the Lord told me, ‘Moody, just get as many into the lifeboat as you can.’” American Fundamentalism was persuasive and argumentative from its birth, and has continued so on, especially given its preeminence placed on particular items of beliefs to be decided on. But the problems with the Bible, over which it separated with Mainline Christianity over, still arose. If the bible was inerrant, which version? Was it the very words, the thoughts, or just the overall concept? And which Bible? Though the Bible has never gone more than a few hundred years without being added or subtracted from, this did not concern an entirely Protestant sect until the findings at Nag Hammadi, the growing awareness of other ancient gospels and apocalypses, or the simple fact that the old manuscripts we have don’t match. What do you do with Mark if it ends 20 different ways depending on which manuscript you grabbed today? And are we then making ourselves a “Paper Pope,” which, although inconsistent to everyone around us, we see as inerrant?

Many more problems were to come, not the least of which was Fundamentalism’s, along with its close cousin Evangelicalism, growing estrangement from the culture at large. The gap was wide enough that this was considered a good thing.

Though the particular fundamentals have changed focus somewhat, they are still remarkably similar a century later. The worldview has not changed much, and so powerful is the idea that we are the norm and just getting back to original Christianity that most fundamentalists seem to be unaware that they are, in fact, fundamentalists. Again, I don’t mean this term to be taken in any derogatory sense, but I do think it would be better for dialogue inside the church if fundamentalists could recognize themselves as every bit as new as the liberals on the other side. Fundamentalists are not recovering the early church, nor are they recovering orthodoxy. It is not there to be recovered. Instead, they are a later movement that appeals to a certain mindset. The unquestioning, unceasing faithfulness of the fundamentalist is admirable. But it is still a 20^th century North American theological movement.

In combating theological liberalism, there is a sense in which Fundamentalists accidentally and unwittingly created *wince* … a newer liberalism. But don’t point that out to them.

Cox closes with this bit:

“Having once experienced at least a hint of the vigor that drives Christian fundamentalists, I am always fascinated by their movements and still feel a touch of empathy with them. I cannot help but admire their commitment and dive. I still find myself at times humming the soaring hymns I learned with them. Still, I also know how much effort it requires to be a fundamentalist. It can get tiring. You must constantly fight not only the skepticism of those around you, but the doubts that arise within yourself. Mainly fundamentalists evoke from me a sense of sadness. Their pathos is that they expend such energy on such a losing cause.”

Harvey Cox’s “The Future of Faith”

I just received for review The Future of Faith by Harvard’s professor of divinity emeritus, Harvey Cox.  I’m going to go ahead and say it’s a must read for anyone interested in a faithfully critical look at the construction of doctrines within Christian history, as well as the different sects that emerged with those doctrines.  Brilliant research, accessible readability, Cox’s personal history with varying traditions, and allegories of discussions with everyone from Jerry Falwell to the Pope Benedict make this an incredibly inclusive and in-depth look at the history of the Church.

Cox’s central thesis is that the church is edging into a “Age of the Spirit,” as he puts it, a move beyond the “Age of Belief” that dominated the church from the 4^th century at Nicaea until the mid 20^th century.  This age of Spirit will see the multifaceted and never consistent belief structure of the pre-Constantinian church, a less emphasis on lists of beliefs as requirement for inclusion, and higher emphasis on praxis.  The age of beliefs killed the spirit, and with it we learned to kill each other for the purpose of consistency under the name of piety.  The Catholics coined the elegant Latin killjoy, Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, to mean there was no salvation outside the (Catholic) Church.  As of late, American Fundamentalism has sought to do the same with sets of beliefs chosen in response to the religious debates of the 1920’s.  As Cox sees it, we are moving beyond this.  While it will never disappear, Fundamentalism is on the decline, and the shift resulting from globalization requires a new emphasis on, not just inter-faith dialogue,  but intrafaith faith dialogue as well with the margins resisting change of any kind from a firmly 19^th/20^th century faith.

In his chapter entitled “The Road Runner and the Gospel of Thomas,” Cox points to salient histories that just ain’t so.  Like the coyote running of a cliff while chasing the roadrunner while continuing to suspend in air, our pervasive myths of history support us well- at least until we learn that we have no historical ground beneath this.  For Catholics, this may come in the form of scholarship highlighting the lack of veracity in claims of Apostolic Succession.  In a system where claim to power comes from being heir to Peter, one needs to continue to believe in a myth that things simply were this way from the beginning.  Protestants do this same thing, believing 1) that there was a set of original beliefs based purely on the Bible (even though the Bible would not be constructed until the late 4^th century) and 2) they, or their church, conforms to this list of proper orthodox beliefs.  In fact, these two beliefs are always illusory.  These misunderstandings stem from, Cox argues, a myth of orthodoxy.  Scholarship is simply pummeling these myths.  As Cox puts it, research shows “scattered throughout the Roman Empire from Antioch to Gaul, there was no standardized theology, no single pattern of governance, no uniform liturgy, and no commonly accepted scripture… Some, especially around Jerusalem, emphasized the historical Jesus; others, the universal Christ; and still others, a mystical inner Christ.”

With the advent of Emperor Constantine pushing for a uniform Christianity to stabilize the fledgling Roman Empire, power was handed to certain clergymen who were by no means disinterested or objective observers. When time came to settle on holy books, beliefs, or authority structures, preferences were read back into the texts and histories selected, which created a myth of orthodoxy.  It’s much the same as the way we remember what we want to remember in order to justify ourselves in a fight, or how we chose to ignore unsettling factoids about past men we want to venerate.  A movement that had begun with a messiah, crucified because of the political danger he posed, now hopped into bed with “the Man.”  Ever since, Christians have felt entitled to political nobility, seeking to create laws that either benefit them or enforce their ideals.  The irony of the first ecumenical council at Nicaea in 325 A.D. being called by a pagan emperor and deciding that, yes, Jesus and God must be one in the same, is an irony lost on most Christians today.  Yes, we believe this about Jesus being co-eternal with the Father, but would we believe this if not for a group of power-hungry bishops being lobbied for this position by a sun-worshipping emperor, all while surrounding the council of bishops stood soldiers with swords drawn awaiting for their consent to a particular belief?  It’s really quite impossible to tell.

Cox argues that 3 developments have undermined the myth of orthodoxy:

1) The 1940’s finding of the ancient texts hidden and preserved in caves provided us with gospels and biblical texts unseen for the better part of two millennia.  Though most likely written under a pseudonym (likely as several books of the New Testament were), the Gospel of Thomas and others presented us with texts every bit as old as several of the Canonical Gospels.  We saw in these ancient manuscripts such evidence that the early Christian community already varied far and wide in belief and practice.  This combined with finding older texts of books we include in the Bible already, texts with sometimes differed very significantly with our versions today (much as your average apologist insists the opposite), shook of the educated world from the myth of a perfectly preserved Biblical text, dictated word-for-word from God, from whence our current beliefs come from.

2)  Until very recently, historians and New Testament scholars did not talk.  One held the realm of scholarship, the other the realm of religion.  After all, Cox comments, NT scholars were supposed to work with inerrant texts, while historians new, with evidence in hand, that this was not the case.  Historians new as well, to the chagrin of Catholic scholars, that apostolic authority was a contrived myth, and nor were early Christian theologians neutral or critical as historians.  But when historians and Biblical scholars hop into bed, a love child of a more educated and informed faith emerges, although this education has been slow to disseminate to the masses.  Even pastors, who become very well aware of the problems with Biblical texts in seminaries, rarely pass on this information to their congregations.

3)  The third development is a “people’s history” of Christianity.  Sans Gutenberg’s cheap publishing, today’s blogs, or even literacy, most of our pictures of early Christianity come from far less than 1%- the most political and the most educated.  Like today’s heady theologians, such men do good work, but do not represent the common people’s Christianity.  Recent work has rediscovered this, painting a broader picture of the amorphous early Church, and further killing the myth of one orthodoxy.

At last, Cox slides in the problem of reading the Gospel through our culture.  As a culture that emphasizes separation of church and state, or coming from a stream of theology that emphasizes “getting saved,” it is all to easy to miss the earthy message of Christ, and the political reasons he was killed for.  We miss the anti-empire rhetoric of Jesus, John’s Revelation, and the early church.  We miss that early Christians were persecuted not for telling people they were going to hell if they didn’t believe in Jesus, but because they refused to pledge allegiance to Rome, because they (in a rare example of early unanimity) refused to participate in politics or the military, because they refused to look like patriots.  In a cultural theology that encourages all these things, it’s really quite easy to miss messages.

More on Cox’s work to come… conversations with the Pope, pagans writing our Creeds, the rise of American 20^th century Fundamentalism, and the future of faith.