Christian Fundamentalism and the Culture of Disenchantment

Introduction: Creed and Critique

introduction creed and critique We’re in a religious war and we need to aggressively oppose secular humanism ; these people are as religiously motivated as we are and they are filled with the devil. —Tim LaHaye, on Jerry Falwell’s show Listen, America! We try to arrange things so that the students who enter as bigoted, homophobic , religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own. . . . We do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. —Richard Rorty, “Universality and Truth” In the current phase of the long-running conflict between religious conservatism and secular liberalism, Tim LaHaye and the late Richard Rorty may serve as this study’s emblematic figures. They are contemporaries (LaHaye was born in 1926, Rorty in 1931), and each occupies a preeminent position in his field. LaHaye, fundamentalist activist and coauthor of the best-selling Left Behind novel cycle, has, since the 1970s, been one of the most prominent leaders of the Christian Right. Indeed, since the partial retirement of the elderly Billy Graham, LaHaye’s influence among American fundamentalists is matched only by that of Pat Robertson and James Dobson. Rorty, who died in 2007, developed a postmodern, neopragmatist strain of thinking that made him a leading voice among his generation’s secular philosophers. He advocated a philosophy that “helps Maltby, Christian Fundamentalism.indd 1 Maltby, Christian Fundamentalism.indd 1 10/29/12 11:00 AM 10/29/12 11:00 AM 2 / introduction along the disenchantment of the world,” a process that will “make the world’s inhabitants more pragmatic, more tolerant, more liberal” (Philosophical Papers 193). This book joins America’s principal culture war on the side of Rorty and the secularists but with two caveats. First, while some strands of my polemic are informed by Rorty’s arguments against metaphysics, this study is not intended as a specifically Rortyian critique of fundamentalism .1 Second, where appropriate, I enlist the support of religious thinkers whose postmodern strains of Christianity are in sympathy with the critical spirit and ethics of secular liberalism. After all, to side with the latter need not commit one to the view that all religious thinking is erroneous or a type of false consciousness. Rather, my religious target is very specific: a belligerent Christian conservatism and its authoritarian belief system.2 My aim is not simply to explore the collision between Christian conservatism and secular liberalism in the United States, but to do so in ways specific to our present conjuncture of cultural forces and political alignments . For these broad categories conceal what I see as a more profound and, in some ways, fiercer conflict of values and belief systems: one that I shall reframe in terms of a clash of fundamentalism and postmodernism. I employ these alternative terms not as substitutes for the former categories but, rather, to designate powerful tendencies within them. (Clearly, not all Christian conservatives are fundamentalists and not all secular liberals are postmodern in outlook.) The antipathy between the broader categories is harshest and most strident where their fundamentalist and postmodern tendencies collide. And I speak of “fundamentalism” and “postmodernism ” because I believe these terms more accurately signify the political commitments, attitudes to knowledge, and aesthetic sensibilities that animate much of the Christian conservative/secular liberal conflict today. My alternative terms should enable a sharper focus on the antithetical paradigms that irredeemably separate each side: paradigms of interpretation and knowledge, of history and nature, of ethics and aesthetics. Indeed, fundamentalism and postmodernism are essentially incommensurable ways of thinking insofar as, when brought into dialogue, there can be no consensus among its interlocutors about the force of the stronger argument . Finally, “fundamentalists” and “postmodernists” must, in the last instance, be understood as convenient conceptual groupings; that is to say, each cohort is, ultimately, somewhat diffuse at its boundaries, rather than consistently and tightly cohesive. Where appropriate, I shall draw atMaltby , Christian Fundamentalism.indd 2 Maltby, Christian Fundamentalism.indd 2 10/29/12 11:00 AM 10/29/12 11:00 AM introduction / 3 tention to those occasions where features of group identity can lose their resolution. I think of fundamentalism and postmodernism as powerfully conflicting tendencies, but not as a strictly diametric opposition. Indeed, elements of one tendency may, at times, overlap with the other. Conceivably, there are occasions when fundamentalists think like postmodernists and vice versa. (Think of the fundamentalists who find themselves entertained by the parody...