Good Old-fashioned Hate

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Years ago, a colleague at The Des Moines Register related what happened when he was covering members of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, KS, who were protesting something or other at the state capitol in Des Moines.

I don’t recall the issue involved, but the signs and speeches of Westboro members against people whom they were protesting were vicious.

Among the Westboro protesters, as I recall, was a boy of about 10 years old, son of one of the church’s leaders. When my colleague asked him if he thought protesting in such a way didn’t show disrespect toward others, the boy simply said, “F*** you!” 

Westboro, which appears to seek out publicity like a heat-seeking missile seeks a target, recently picketed the funeral of Beau Biden, son of vice president Joe Biden, in Delaware. According to the confusing information on Westboro’s web site – whose address is godhatesfags.com – the protest was against the vice president for “training Beau Biden to worship and serve Joe’s favorite idols: American military, perverse Catholic monstrosity, and political office/trappings.”

Like I said, it’s confusing, but Westboro is surely the church most people love to hate, and most Baptists are probably embarrassed by them. But it’s merely the most noxious of many fundamentalist groups.

In my view, there’s a big problem with fundamentalism itself, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish. And for me, it’s the flight from reality. Ok, so plenty of critics would say that all religion is that, but I don’t agree. The ability to make distinctions, after all, is fundamental to human intelligence.

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And that’s precisely my problem with fundamentalism. It flees from distinctions, hoping that it can maintain a simplified, uncomplicated world that exists only in its communal mind.

Here’s how Wikipedia defines fundamentalism.

“The term … is most often characterized by a markedly strict literalism as applied to certain specific scriptures, dogmas, or ideologies, and a strong sense of the importance of maintaining in-group and out-group distinctions, leading to an emphasis on purity and the desire to return to a previous ideal from which it is believed that members have begun to stray."

Tomas Halik, the Czech psychologist and theologian whom I quote often in these blogs, views fundamentalism as “a disorder of a faith that tries to entrench itself within the shadows of the past against the disturbing complexity of life.

“Those who wish to seek the living God…,” he writes, “must have the courage to learn to swim in deep water, not in the shallows. God is in the depths; He is not to be found in the shallows.”

To me, fundamentalism also signals an unwillingness to accept the uncertainty that must accompany faith. Believers must “walk by faith, not by sight,” and faith means the willingness to tolerate uncertainty. The absence of this tolerance, seems to me, allows you to be smug, judgmental and rigid in what you believe and what you expect from others. And it demands conformity.

“When faith leads to conformism,” wrote Diarmuid Martin, archbishop of Dublin in a 2013 speech entitled, A Post-Catholic Ireland? “it has betrayed the very nature of faith. Conformism falsely feels that it has attained certainty. Faith is always a leap into the unknown and a challenge to go beyond our own limits and beyond our own certainties and the distorted understanding that comes from them.”

If God is the ultimate author of life – even though we may not understand the details of his/her authorship - you have to believe that human intelligence has some purpose, that humans are required to think through the meaning of life as a way of seeking God. Fundamentalism snubs thoughtfulness in deference to dogmatism and intolerance.

To criticize dogmatism is not to say that there’s no need for dogma. Dogma is simply a matter of formulating what you believe and how to express it. In the case of Christianity, it’s a matter mostly of determining what Jesus intended and organizing that in some intelligible manner.

“Dogmatism” is something else. It’s a denial of the need for growth in understanding those beliefs and the need to interpret them anew for each generation.

Although I’m not keen on fundamentalism, there are some things I admire about fundamentalists, including their single-mindedness and the courage of their convictions. In the face of widespread indifference toward God and religion, people seeking God and many believers could use a little more of those qualities.

“Faith,” to return to Halik, “is the possibility of re-interpreting what seemed so cut and dried from ‘the world’s’ point of view. …It means the courage to … persevere on the path of unselfishness, nonviolence, and generous love, even if it means defying this world’s logic, power, and usual style.”