There is something new under the sun
Recent postings on JU have expressed frustration and annoyance with what has been seen as a fundamentalist hijacking of the Christian religion, while the fundamentalists in reply claim to be doing no more than expressing the original purity and power of the Christian religion as it was known to those who encountered and followed Jesus of Nazareth. My own view on the matter is that this Christian Fundamentalism, far from being a renewal of the faith in its pristine original purity, represents a historically new American religion, rooted in Christianity (as Christianity itself was rooted in Judaism), but representing in many ways an impoverishment of the original message.
In the last years of the nineteenth century the young American republic began to overtake the great powers of the day – Great Britain, France and Germany – as the centre of global political and economic power crossed the Atlantic. America was in part founded on European political idealism, while at the same time rejecting the various tyrannies by which that continent was then ruled - and in some places continued to be ruled until the late twentieth century.
So distinguishing themselves from Europeans, even while peoples of European origin made up the bulk of its immigrant population, was always an important priority for the young Republic. It began with language: although utopian schemes to replace the English tongue with Ancient Greek, or some other politically and culturally neutral language were quickly rejected, Noah Webster and other pioneers began self-consciously to try and construct an American language. And today, it is the American language that the businessmen of Asia are keen to learn: those of us from other English-speaking countries fortunate enough to make our living from teaching English can largely do so by hanging on to the economic coat-tails of the contemporary world’s only ‘hyperpower’.
The new Americans also brought their religion over from the Old World, with a clear Protestant Christian majority, but even here there was a pressure to make their religion, like their language, distinctively ‘American’ in some way. The most spectacular example in which this was realised was the foundation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) who came to believe that Jesus Christ could never have overlooked the nation of Manifest Destiny in his earthly mission and must in fact have gone there at some stage in his ministry. This, however, was only the most extreme measure to give an ‘American’ dimension to the Christian religion.
America today embodies a fascinating contradiction: some of the early colonies were founded as Puritan theocracies, reflecting the utopian desire to create an earthly New Jersualem away from the corruption of the Old World. Today American conservative christians insist that the nation was founded as an avowedly christian country. At the same time the Founding Fathers who actually brought the nation into existence, under the influence of European Liberal beliefs, thought hard about how to establish a clear separation of church and state, protecting unbelief as well as belief in a way that most European nations took generations to catch up with.
For the most part, the early American Christians came from protestant non-conformist backgrounds, and the New World served as a refuge from the indignities, sometimes petty, sometimes lethal, that they were subject to in the nations from which they fled. For this reason religion also took on a political dimension, noting in particular the Anglicanism (Episcopalianism) of the pro-British Tories of the Revolutionary war, which continues to be main religious tradition of the East Coast’s ‘Wasp’ or ‘Boston Brahmin’ ‘aristocracy’.
For most of the nineteenth century, Americans still looked to Europe for leadership in cultural matters and it took a long time for the new nation to acquire the cultural self-confidence which it so abundantly enjoys today. Before the age of jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and Hollywood, it was widely assumed that the citizens of the young Republic still needed to look back across the Atlantic to acquire the latest fashions and artistic tastes.
The nineteenth century, which was the crucial era in which America first stepped forward in to a world leadership role, was also a pivotal time in the evolution of the Christian religion, as the explanations about the world from traditional faith came under increasing fire from new scientific discoveries and theories, in particular Charles Darwin’s ideas as embodied in The Origins of Species (1859). While it is true that most European Christians also re-acted to these new ideas with scepticism and hostility, as indeed they had to the earlier ideas of Galileo and others, the United States saw a particularly powerful confluence of a rejection of scientific modernism alongside a number of dramatic revivalist movements, like the Restoration Movement and the Great Awakenings, that was to lead to the creation of what I would argue is a largely new religion, based in traditional christianity, but marked by an uncompromising resistance to every taint of modernism, and a literalist reading of scripture, which while seeming to be highly traditional was actually something new. Ironically, in fighting the science of the day, these forefathers of the new American fundamentalist religion took on a kind of ‘scientistic’ thinking of their own: whereas traditional christians had a long tradition of reading the Bible in an allegorical and symbolic way, the new fundamentalists saw the good book as something to be read as a kind of scientific manual, - science after all being the new spirit of the age - but God’s science, not the ‘Devil’s science’ of evolution, man from monkeys, and dinosaur fossils planted by Satan to shake our faith.
To highlight the different ways in which Christianity developed in the United States and in Europe, it is worth pointing out that there was no real European equivalent of the Scopes trial of 1925 which sought to prohibit the teaching of "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals" in state funded schools in Tennessee. And while Americans today continue to argue fiercely about the teaching of Intelligent Design in public schools, it is worth noting how differently the Christian churches in Europe have re-acted to this issue. Pope John Paul II in a letter from 1996 says of evolution, "It is indeed remarkable that this theory has progressively taken root in the minds of researchers following a series of discoveries made in different spheres of knowledge", and that "the convergence, neither sought nor provoked, of results of studies undertaken independently from each other constitutes, in itself, a significant argument in favour of this theory…" In the UK, the Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the world-wide Anglican (Episcopalian) fellowship had this to say recently about the proposal to teach Intelligent Design in UK schools, "I think creationism is ... a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories ... if creationism is presented as a stark alternative theory alongside other theories I think there's just been a jarring of categories ... My worry is creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it". [My emphasis]. The title of John Paul’s letter on the matter, ‘Truth Cannot Contradict Truth’is itself indicative of a certain attitude alien to fundamentalism, that is that modern science, including Darwinian ideas, and religion can march hand in hand as human beings attempt to penetrate the mysteries both of the natural world and of our ultimate spiritual destiny.
Some American fundamentalists counter this by arguing that christianity is ‘dying’ in a secularised Europe, while it remains strong in America. While arguments about who is a ‘real christian’ are ultimately fruitless, if not even a little blasphemous, I would have to argue that the number of those truly and sincerely trying to live out the gospel is unlikely to be that much higher in the US than in Europe or anywhere else.
The new Christian Fundamentalism is therefore largely an American cultural phenomenon. In as much as it exists elsewhere in the world it does so mostly, like Coca-Cola and Levis as a successful cultural export. Though churches like the Assemblies of God, and Church of Christ can be found in many nations around the globe, all these denominations had their origin in the US. On a personal note, my paternal grandfather was the secretary of the first Christadelphian Ecclesia set up in England, yet another missionary religious movement that had crossed the Atlantic to establish itself in a foreign soil.
In summary I would argue that America’s increasingly dominant position in the world has created an opportunity for a particular kind of religion, rooted in patriotism and American Exceptionalism, to serve as the de facto spiritual ideology of American power and might. And for this reason it needs to be a particularly American religion, clearly marked out from traditional christianity with its European, and Middle Eastern origins. Just as the Roman legionary looked to Iupiter Optimus et Maximus, as the spiritual force behinds his nation’s power and destiny, the Jesus of the Fundamentalist faith can play the same role for his American equivalent today. Not that this is always the case. It is important when tempted to automatically equate Christian Fundamentalism with American hegemony to remember that many fundamentalists are highly critical of contemporary American society and culture, and in their other-worldly ‘end times’ (the ‘rapture is just around the corner’) theology, some fundamentalists see American power as simply another part of that world which is about to pass away. Nevertheless, my argument remains that Christian Fundamentalism is a historically new phenomenon, derived from but differing from the Christian religion as traditionally understood, arising out of America’s social and religious history, and that its world-wide spread is a by-product of America’s political, economic, military and cultural dominance of the world today.