Differentiations of Consciousness
By Eugene Webb
See Web Link on this site under “Webb”
I have added some personal notes in Blue Bold, Mike
“A thinker who has undergone a differentiation of consciousness, will not be able to communicate fully the insights he (she) develops within the new order of consciousness to those who do not also dwell within it.
(a simple illustration is between common sense thinking and theoretical thinking. Common sense only works from the perspective of how objects appear to subjects. If you kick a rock you will likely hurt your toes. But if you ask what is a rock? You will get a complicated answer that doesn’t seem possible to a person who has no knowledge of science.
For those who have achieved this differentiation of consciousness communicating from either realm of consciousness is fairly easy. It is almost impossible for those who have not.)
This is what led Voegelin in various essays written between the first three volumes of Order and History (1956-1957) and the fourth (1974) to begin talking about what he called the problem of secondary symbolism, that is, the tendency of symbolizations of experience to be reinterpreted by their hearers in ways that root them in a more restricted experience than that of the original speaker. The new symbolizations that are engendered when a new dimension of experience opens up and is given voice are what Voegelin called primary symbols; those that may use the same words or forms but attach them to the more limited experiences of the old order of consciousness he called secondary.
In our post enlightenment age “The Real” is limited to what is material—objects extended in space and time. But, the spiritual realm is left to individuals to accept or deny. It is assumed by many that the spiritual is not empirically verifiable, it is relegated to the individual’s imagination. Christianity. From this perspective the spiritual is not relevant to the public good. And when it is called upon as a public symbol, as it is in some schools, courts and legislative bodies, Christianity seems to suffer from the effect of being a “secondary symbol.” It has lost what Voegelin seeks to reclaim; The Power of Primary Symbolism.”
The reasons for this are complicated. For example the cross was experienced by the apostle Paul as powerful symbol of God’s love for the world—AND—God’s desire that evil would be overcome with mercy and grace. In other words evil would be transformed e.g. the greatest evil of crucifying an innocent God/Man would become the way that people would come to experience forgiveness and salvation.
So, today the church tends to side with power. We see this in the Christian Right’s default support of wars __Both military conflicts and the culture wars that value free markets without restrictions__ . This is an example of Augustine’s Lust for Power, an attempt to destroy the perceived “enemy.” On the other side, the Christian Extreme Left seems impotent and just wants everyone to leave each other alone. Tolerance without distinction between good and evil is to abandon the principles of Truth and Justice.(Mike)
Voegelin’s sense of this problem, and some of his frustration regarding it, found vivid expression in the fourth volume, The Ecumenic Age, where he even spoke of it as the central concern of his work:
The return from symbols which have lost their meaning to the experiences which constitute meaning is ... generally recognizable as the problem of the present.... The great obstacle to this return is the massive block of accumulated symbols, secondary and tertiary, which eclipses the reality of man’s experience in the Metaxy. (The Metaxy is The Between realm of the Transcendent and the material) To raise this obstacle and its structure into consciousness, and by its removal, to help in the return to the truth of reality as it reveals itself in history, has become the purpose of Order and History. (P. 58)
I begin with a quote from Eugene Webb because his theme identifies a fundamental problem in our contemporary world: Communication.
There is no lack of data being communicated- just watch cable news for the endless rounds of biased talking points—few of which aim at telling the truth, because they are all about promoting their own worldview. But, Eric Voegelin was different. He aimed for and does a heroic job at truth telling.
Next is an excerpt from “Protestant Epistemology and Othello’s Consciousness”
(If you would like the full essay in pdf form simply email me at mikealbertson1@mac.com )
PROTESTANT EPISTEMOLOGY AND OTHELLO’S CONSCIOUSNESS
From among Shakespeare’s canon, Othello stands out as one of the fullest in terms of theological references, particularly in terms of Protestant/Catholic dualities. Given the superabundance of such imagery, it seems clear that Shakespeare’s tragedy is inviting meditation upon these topics. To what, however, all these references ultimately tend has been grist for the critical mill in a significant amount of scholarship, including relatively recent work. One general reading argues that the play represents a Protestant critique of Catholicism. Some typical developments of this approach include interpreting Desdemona as a problematic Marian mediator, Iago as a cunning Jesuit manipulator, and Othello as a dupe of Catholic superstitious mysticism and semi-Pelagianism (The belief that human beings can earn their own salvation).1 Another major point of critical inquiry into the play, given of course that its plot is driven by a tragic error in judgment, has centered upon epistemological questions. Much of this literature, while drawing upon a variety of conceptual systems, has examined the tragedy as enacting the problem of literalism, of mistaking narratives or imaginative constructs for the objective realities which they only signify.2 Clearly, the epistemological and the theological are both thematically central to the play. Moreover, epistemology is one of the points of division between Protestant and Catholic understandings. In this study, therefore, I would like to attempt a reading that includes these critical points of connection. More specifically,
I will argue that Othello’s truth-seeking approach, which parallels in key respects a distinctively Protestant epistemology, contributes to his deception and consequent tragedy. Shakespeare’s tragic representation may, therefore, be read partly as a cautionary tale for a particular cast of mind.
This is a historically accurate assessment from a critical realist philosophical position. Essentially it has to do with the influence of philosophical nominalism which was an important influence of Luther and Calvin in particular. Most educated Christians are not interested in philosophy. So, few investigate the philosophical assumptions at work in the Reformation. This, of course, is not a defense for the sad state of Catholic Church practices at the time of the Reformation. But, those errors—and they were significant—had to do less with philosophy and more to the bending of the clerical knee to the acquisition and use of POWER. (See the essay linked to my homepage concerning
The Pneumopathology of the Puritan )
As a starting point, we might turn to the famous Luther/Erasmus debate regarding freedom of the will. Relevant for our purposes is, rather than Luther’s conclusion, his mode of arrival. To Erasmus’s protestations for the reasonableness of free will, Luther attacks…, he insists that the Scriptural texts simply deny the idea (of free will), as desirable as it may be. Luther’s methodology, therefore, is rigorous in its rationalistic and empirical skepticism. His emphasis, of course made famous in the slogan of sola Scriptura, is to deny human beings the right to add anything to the strict data of the sacred text. The tool of human logic is valuable chiefly for its deconstructive power to chop down false myths, including the myth of human freedom.
It is ironic that the cry of Scripture Alone does not recognize the need for human interpretation. If God said “let the Moabites swim in the sewer” then too bad for the decedents of Moabites. Except of course for Ruth who is identified in the list of ancestors of Jesus of Nazareth. So, as every school girl knows Peter Abelard’s “The Book of Yes and No” served for three centuries before the Reformation as the theologian’s educational text. For each of 135 statements the book of Sic et Non provided a list of scriptures and church theologians statements both for and against the statement. They knew that anyone can find a proof text for any position they want to promote. Those who seek the truth look at all the evidence. Seek to understand it, attempt to reconcile differences. And settle on the truth wherever it might be.
By its nature, of course, logic cannot construct new data; such an act, at least traditionally understood, lies in the domain of the imagination rather than reason. This empirical approach therefore sharply limits imaginative activity, which must be constrained on account of its tendency to construct idols of erroneous doctrines, products of the corrupted human mind rather than of divine revelation.
The obvious objection, which Luther acknowledges, is the appearance of a monstrous, unjust God who punishes hapless creatures without rhyme or reason. In explanation, Luther declares:
If His justice were such as could be adjudged just by human reckoning, it clearly would not be Divine; it would in no way differ from human justice. But inasmuch as He is the one true God, wholly incomprehensible and inaccessible to man’s understanding, it is reasonable, indeed inevitable, that His justice also should be incomprehensible.
(Dillenberger 200) 4
Most Christians do not grasp the way that God was understood by the early Reformers. Because their education had been greatly influenced by nominalism, the logical conclusion to the thesis : “ God is just because God limits His power to only do that which is Good,” was inconsistent with the Nominalist God, “an unpredictable God who made Good anything He chose to do.” Ethics was cut off from God’s behavior. For Nominalist influenced reformers--- because of His supreme majesty—what ever God did was defacto Good. This along with the concept of God’s predestination resulted in a belief that even if God chose to save a wreathed person and condemn a virtuous one, it was just because God chose to do it.
Luther’s portrait of God, therefore, perforce concludes with a mystical embracing of mystery. …He very much affirms the representation of Scripture, especially where the sacred text is literal rather than narrative.5 Luther’s mysticism, in his own words, is “reasonable.” Like a post-Enlightenment scientist, he eagerly accepts all available data but maintains a careful discipline regarding flights of fancy. The apparent conclusion reached by his method, that God condemns sinners who have no freedom to obey Him, simply represents the limits of the available information and of the capacity of the human mind. …he simply insists upon the paradox which highlights human finitude.
In a certain respect, therefore, one can see that Luther’s rigorous literalism, ironically enough, renders him more mystical than the aforementioned Jesuit, whose imaginative sojourns construct possibilities more amenable to reason. His system also places a particular burden upon the believer, who must assent to a justice invisible to the mind. Logic cannot break the Gordian knot, and the imagination is discouraged, for the purposes of doctrinal purity, from creating new possibilities outside of the system. The particular spirit created by Luther’s method manifests itself in a variety of respects in later Protestant thought and culture.
The Cultural History of American Fundamentalism:
A Review Essay
http://lincolnmullen.com/blog/the-cultural-history-of-american-fundamentalism/ 01 June 2010 Bendroth, Margaret Lamberts. Fundamentalists in the City: Conflict and Division in Boston’s Churches, 1885-1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.Carpenter, Joel A. Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.Larson, Edward J. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. New York: Basic Books, 1997.University Press, 2006. Watt, David Harrington. A Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth-Century American Evangelicalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991.
In 1980 George Marsden published Fundamentalism and American Culture, a history of the first decades of American fundamentalism. The book quickly rose to prominence in the historical profession, provoking new studies of American fundamentalism and contributing to a renewal of interest in American religious history. The book’s timing was fortunate, for it was published as a resurgent fundamentalism was becoming active in politics and society. The rise of the Christian right provoked the question: where did the movement come from?
The historical interpretation of fundamentalism that was then current could not provide an adequate answer. In the standard narrative, fundamentalism was a reaction by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century evangelical Christians against modernizations in American society, such as industrialization, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and changes in popular mores. Fundamentalists resented modernization because it clashed with their out-of-date worldview and literal faith in the Bible and Christian doctrine. Within the American denominations, fundamentalists fought modernists in losing battles over doctrines such as the inspiration of the Bible, the creation of the world, and the virgin birth of Jesus, but fundamentalists were eventually driven from their denominations in defeat.
(I would assert that fundamentalists fought a losing battle over doctrine….in a different way. On my website pastormike40390.com under “Featured Essays” is an article titled, The Pneumopathology of the Puritan: Adaptations of Hooker by Shakespeare and Voegelin,
The argument asserts that The English Puritans had succumbed to what Augustine had named Libido Dominandi (Loosely translated Lust for Power). It is a shocking revelation that ought to result in self-reflection and denominational repentance, especially by the current Right wing religious groups that fall so easily into using political clout in order to legislate their view of morality. Furthermore a careful analysis of church doctrinal practices during the 17thth-20 centuries in America reveals a faulty prophetic emphasis by fundamentalist evangelicals, that among other things, rationalized slavery, and emphasized the soon coming return of Christ. This last focus, with Pre, Mid and Post tribulation scenarios, dominated the “revivalists” preaching for centuries. And it continues to influence with books like The Late Great Planet Earth, and the Left Behind series.) Fundamentalists also mounted a bid to retain control of American society, most notably through laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools. Their attempt was soundly defeated and ridiculed at the 1925 Scopes trial. After the trial, fundamentalists were demoralized and in retreat, sufficiently marginalized that they could never again make a serious effort to control the nation. By defining fundamentalism as a reaction against modernism, the standard narrative implicitly predicted that fundamentalism would disappear as the United States completed modernizing. (While this article focuses on Fundamentalism in negative light, I believe the more important issue is to better understand all of the consequences that the Enlightenment’s anti religious bias has had on the typical American religious worldview. The compartmentalization of economic systems, political power, from core religious values has been tragic).
When fundamentalism reappeared in the 1970s, the flaws in that interpretation were revealed. In its place, a new body of historical work, including Marsden’s book, redefined fundamentalism not as evangelicalism reacting against modernism, but as evangelicalism adopting modernism. The first historian to make this argument was Ernest R. Sandeen in The Roots of Fundamentalism. Sandeen saw fundamentalism as a movement descended from American and British evangelicalism with the additions of dispensationalist eschatology and an explicit definition of the verbal inspiration of the Bible. George Marsden expanded on Sandeen’s definition by unpacking the significance of those additions. Dispensationalism divided history and biblical prophecy into a series of eras, or dispensations—a type of scientific classification. By defining biblical inspiration as extending to the very words of Scripture, fundamentalists created a new hermeneutic which treated the Bible as a source of data to be mined and scientifically analyzed. Marsden further observed that fundamentalism added borrowings from the Holiness movement and from Scottish commonsense realism.
(Scottish Commonsense realism supported Evangelical Christians in the Holiness movement. Unfortunately, while it is much more coherent than the secular positivists and empirical-materialist, it lacks explanatory powers. Basically, it is a common sense description of how things appear to be. In order to get to an explanation of what and how things are and relate to other things one needs to have a differentiated consciousness. Those that are able to, move from common sense to theory as the subject presents itself. Those that are limited to common sense alone remain biased, e.g. climate change deniers, and evolution deniers. The ability to think in terms of common sense alone is a truncated position compared to critical realist thinkers. (See my website for Differentiated Consciousness)
The implications of Marsden’s redefinition were radical. He revealed that fundamentalism was not rural, Southern, and pre-modernist, but rather urban, often Northern, and aggressively modern. Its relationship to modernism led to a paradox in fundamentalists’ identity. On the one hand, fundamentalists identified as heirs to the Protestant establishment of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, they saw themselves as displaced from power by a new modernism, though partaking of what they found desirable in it. Marsden’s explication of this paradox had great power to explain fundamentalism’s struggle to control the United States at the same time that they felt alienated from it. Even though Marsden ended his book in the 1930s, his thesis could explain how fundamentalism, moribund after the Scopes trial, could rise again in the 1970s.
Marsden does not address an important issue, one that plays an important role in 20th century American political and religious development. My American Church History professor Newel Williams taught his class with an emphasis on the correlation between faith practices of main line denominations, and the support or rejection of trust in the USA, federal, state and local governments. A significant split came during the Social Gospel movement of the 1890-1910 era. The Northern urban cities experienced a harsh and seemingly hopeless political reality. Child labor laws were weak if they existed at all, public health issues were unchecked and explosive, with death coming to women and children in epidemic proportion. Education for children was not compulsory and avoided when family needs intervened. Thus, the churches responded with a call for gospel action to change laws and lawmakers as needed. However the majority of folks living in the South, the West and in rural areas of the North, thought this business of telling them when their kids could or could not work in the fields was some was sort of liberal collusion. The divide remains in the Red state Blue state dynamics in both church and state. The East coast liberal establishments of higher education were quick to deconstruct the path that led to American Involvement in WWI. American involvement in the war, the theory goes, was encouraged by industrial leaders that would benefit from the war. But it was the religious preachers that they hired that preached a message to American isolationists that God desired intervention in order to protect the innocent. The propaganda used by some of these preachers was fabricated and yet proved persuasive. During the decade after the war, the massive toll of dead and wounded prompted many Liberal Arts college faculties to denounce the war mongers. Faith in government declined and so did religious attendance. The roaring 20’s ensued as well as the Wall street predators. BUT, in the south and west and rural north it remained God, Country and Flag. The churches there grew and so did the influence of Fundamentalism.
Joel Carpenter extended the history of fundamentalism beyond the 1930s in his book Revive Us Again. Carpenter agreed with Marsden that fundamentalism was not merely a reaction against modernism. Carpenter’s insight was that fundamentalists’ defeat at the Scopes trial did not necessarily mean that fundamentalism retreated after the 1930s. Rather, Carpenter looked at how fundamentalists created their own network of extra-denominational institutions, most notably Bible colleges that turned out thousands of pastors, evangelists, and missionaries. Also important in linking fundamentalists together were publishing houses, radio shows, and Bible and prophecy conferences. In one sense the creation of these networks was a retreat, because fundamentalists increasingly withdrew from “the world” and from liberal denominations, thus forming their own subculture. Still, because most fundamentalists tended to form para-church institutions rather than denominations, one could identify as a fundamentalist and contribute to fundamentalist organizations even while remaining in mainline denominations. Fundamentalists’ withdrawal was driven far more by their theology of separation from the world than by any marginalization at the Scopes trial.
Even in the period that Carpenter studies, fundamentalists refused to give up their claim to cultural dominance and instead planned for a revival. What was surprising about 1970s fundamentalism, then, was not its strength or its claims to cultural primacy, but the decision of leaders like Falwell to give up withdrawal (from culture and politics) in favor of political activism. Even political activism, though, was a part of fundamentalists’ heritage. They were heirs to the evangelical reform movements in the nineteenth century, such as temperance, abolition, and benevolence. Fundamentalism was also a way to be modern while critiquing the reformers of the Progressive era. Anti-evolution crusades were, for example, an attempt to defend the doctrine of creation, but they were also critiques of efforts to reform society scientifically, such as eugenics.
There is no doubt that the Liberal perspective with its mantra of Progress Everywhere was delusional. Lonergan sums it up like this. Western culture is in a long cycle of decline, Progress occurs occasionally, but it is Redemption that will make the difference. He sums this up with his theory Law of the Cross (see my website).
I will end my commentary here. The rest of the article may be of interest to some readers, but my point is made in the example of the Puritans attempt to legislate the totality of life under a theocracy, along with their willingness to use force as needed to accomplish the end. This militaristic ethos remains, for me, the hallmark of evangelical fundamentalists. The current cry to rally true believers and shun false believers over the policies relating to same sex relationships is characteristic of self-righteous fundamentalism. (It is the characteristic of nominalist philosophical thinking—). Instead we ought to better understand human sexuality and develop policies in e.g. The United Methodist Book of Discipline that reflect certain basic Biblical truths concerning sexuality. For example, a good start would aim to rally all United Methodists to determine the meaning of fornication and adultery. My understanding is that the Greek word translated in English as “fornication” describes a number of sexual activities that have in common 1) The predatory nature of the activity, and 2) an emphasis on an individual’s sexual gratification at the expense of another person. Certainly all Christians could agree that fornication is rightly condemned. Yet, we know from experience that some children are sexually abused and grow up as damaged sexual beings. Thus our reaction to those who are guilty of fornication ought to be redemptive and healing, not necessarily punitive. Likewise “adultery” literally means breaking down the bonds of intimacy and love. Thus the three places in Matthew’s gospel that speak of both issues make better sense with what I understand to be true about them.
Matthew 5:27–28 "You have heard the commandment that says, 'You must not commit adultery.' But I say, anyone who even looks at a woman with lust (breaks down the bonds of committed love and thus) has already committed adultery with her in his heart." (NLT)
Matthew 15:19 For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies ... (KJV) It is true that breaking the bonds of committed love and using others as sexual objects for personal gratification are both rightly condemned. It is wrong to lump every possible sexual activity outside of marriage as “fornication.” Just as it is wrong to lust after another because that breaks down the bonds of committed relationships.
Matthew 19:9 And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery. (KJV) If one person divorces another because that person is exploiting others for sexual gratification, then the bonds of marriage are already broken: adultery has already taken place.
Back to the essay… Legal historian Edward J. Larson took up the study of fundamentalism and anti-evolution in his Pulitzer prize–winning book Summer for the Gods. The book is a history of the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925, covering both the trial and its aftermath. Larson pointed out that Dayton was not particularly fundamentalist, but that boosters drummed up the trial as a publicity stunt to put their town on the map. The trial might not have turned into a religious showdown until Clarence Darrow, a famous trial attorney who was a public agnostic, and William Jennings Bryan, a politician and leader of the anti-evolution movement, took the case as lead counsel for the defense and the prosecution, respectively. Darrow and Bryan, along with reporters like H. L. Mencken, turned the trial into a cause célèbrethat tested the validity of fundamentalist Christianity, climaxing in Darrow’s questioning of Bryan on the witness stand as an expert on the Bible.
Larson proves that the Scopes trial was not the defeat for fundamentalists that historians have portrayed it as. Indeed, fundamentalists won the trial and took it as encouragement in their crusade. On appeal, the Tennessee Supreme Court used a technicality to avoid fining John Scopes but also to avoid striking down the anti-evolution law, which remained on the books for decades. The rewriting of the history of the Scopes trial into a victory for modernism did not occur for decades, most notably in the writings of Charles Beard and in the Broadway play and film Inherit the Wind, produced in the 1950s as a fictionalized critique of McCarthyism.
Larson’s book makes it possible to write a history of fundamentalism that could escape the undue influence of the Scopes trial. For too long, historians have relied on the trial as a milestone marking the periodization of religious history. Because it was extraordinary, the trial is a useful lens for studying American religion, but because it is extraordinary, the trial cannot be taken as typifying the course of fundamentalism. What is needed is a history of fundamentalism that takes the trial into account, yet which refuses to periodize the history of fundamentalism around the mistaken notion that it was a turning point. By doing so, historians can move beyond the narratives of declension and revival into which religious history too often falls.
Marsden and Carpenter’s cultural histories provide one way of situating fundamentalism, whether in decline or revival, within American culture. In A Transforming Faith, David Harrington Watt provides a complementary approach. Where Marsden and Carpenter explicate fundamentalists’ distinctive subculture, Watt examines how American culture shapes and controls the culture of fundamentalism. His approach depends on the same definition of fundamentalism as modern, yet it recasts the inquiry in a profitable new way.
Watt examines how a subculture can maintain its identity within a dominant culture, a hegemonic relationship he terms “asymmetrical power.” Watt argues that American fundamentalists since the 1950s, for all their withdrawal from and critiques of American culture, bought into the major characteristics of the dominant culture. Watt begins with an essay on Bill Bright’s evangelistic tract “Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?” pointing out how the text markets Christianity as a commodity. He extends similar analysis
to other parts of evangelism. Evangelical teaching on marriage and the family were often indebted to feminism, while evangelical counseling owed as much to psychology as to the Bible. Evangelical politics bought uncritically into conservative, free market ideas. Watt’s title points to evangelicalism not as a faith that transforms culture, but as a faith that was transforming under culture’s influence.
Marsden’s, Carpenter’s, and Watts’s books are cultural histories that attempt to examine fundamentalism as a whole, to come to grips with its essential characteristics while remaining within the particulars of history. A local history that points in a promising direction for new research is Margaret Bendroth’s Fundamentalists in the City. Bendroth’s book is a fine-grained study of fundamentalist congregations, leaders, and events in Boston from the 1880s to the 1950s. Her chapters on Tremont Temple and Park Street Church in particular make good use of demographic data and show a fine sensitivity to the local motivations and methods peculiar to each congregation. Defining fundamentalism as “oppositional” evangelicalism, Bendroth finds that fundamentalists in Boston did not fight primarily against theological liberals, many of whom called Boston and Cambridge home, but rather against Catholics. Fundamentalists’ battles were inextricably linked to local politics, which in Boston were defined by a statehouse controlled by Protestants and a city hall controlled by Catholics. This kind of insight which could not be deduced from a national history is precisely the promise of local histories of fundamentalism. Bendroth’s study also does valuable work in confirming the conclusions of broader studies, for example, by illustrating how Gordon College was a crucial nexus for Boston fundamentalists, and by showing how fundamentalism flourished even in Boston in the periods when it was supposed to have been in decline.
Bendroth’s history might well be taken as a model by future historians of fundamentalism, who must fill up the deficit of local histories of fundamentalism. To be sure, there have been many highly particular books on recent fundamentalism. Some of these are exposes, whether as journalism or as memoir. Of more scholarly use are David Watt’s brief ethnographic studies of three Philadelphia congregations in the 1990s, and James M. Ault’s sociological study of a Baptist congregation in 1980s Worcester, Massachusetts. These studies are all recent, though, and they are not histories. What is needed are local studies of fundamentalist congregations or institutions, researched in the tradition of ethnographic history and focusing on the congregants rather than the leaders. If the sources are extant, numerous congregations present themselves as options: J. Frank Norris’s First Baptist Church in Fort Worth; William Bell Riley’s First Baptist Church in Minneapolis, John R. Rice’s Sword of the Lord conferences; A. C. Dixon’s Moody Church in Chicago or Metropolitan Tabernacle in London; and D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s Westminster Chapel in London.
If the history of fundamentalism could benefit from going local, it could also benefit from going transatlantic. Some of the British connection of fundamentalism are well known, such as the tours in Britain by evangelists from D. L. Moody to Billy Graham. Other known connections include how American fundamentalism imported Dispensationalism and the literal interpretation of biblical prophecy from John Nelson Darby and the Plymouth Brethren, and later imported apologetics and fiction from C. S. Lewis. Some pastors, such as A. C. Dixon, held pulpits in both Britain and United States. Less well known, though, is how British and American Christians interacted on a regular basis, and how fundamentalism in America and conservative evangelicalism in Britain functioned in their different political and cultural circumstances. Some excellent work has been done in tracing evangelicalism in the Anglophone world, most notably the series A History of Evangelicalism, edited by Mark Noll and David Bebbington. A transatlantic study along those lines could free the study of American fundamentalists from what may be invalid assumptions about its peculiar Americanness. Such a transatlantic history would be a return to Ernest Sandeen’s insight that dispensationalist theology could be understood only by linking British and American history.
Historians of fundamentalism have made many advances since the 1980s. They have dispelled mistaken interpretations of fundamentalism and contributed a great deal of knowledge about the movement’s culture. These gains might be consolidated in a history told finally without dependence on the Scopes trial. And they might be advanced by pursuing further studies fundamentalism in both its local and its transatlantic contexts.
George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).↩
Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 16-18, 43-71, 80-100, 102-22. Marsden’s helpful definitions of the terms fundamentalism and evangelicalism and their varying usage over time are on pages 234-35. Fundamentalists themselves have put much effort into defining their movement, for example, David O. Beale, In Pursuit of Purity: American Fundamentalism Since 1850 (Greenville, SC: Unusual Publications, 1986), 3-12. These definitions tend to be normative rather than descriptive.↩
Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 6-8.↩
Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 13-32, 57-75, 124-40. For a study of fundamentalists’ appropriation of modern mass culture, see Douglas Carl Abrams, Selling the Old-Time Religion: American Fundamentalists and Mass Culture, 1920-1940 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001).↩
Carpenter, Revive Us Again, 32, 54, 110-23, 187-232.↩
Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 92-93, 101-5, 116-21, 198.↩
Larson, Summer for the Gods, 225-66.↩
An example of a work which purports to displace the Scopes trial as “antievolution’s defining moment” is Michael Lienesch, In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), which nevertheless spends only two chapters tracing the history of anti-evolution movements after Scopes.↩
David Harrington Watt, A Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth-Century American Evangelicalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). Most histories of fundamentalism, like those of Marsden and Carpenter, have tried to explicate fundamentalism’s subculture. Another fine work in this mode is Randall Herbert Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). A recent book that, like Watt, is more concerned to show how American culture has influenced religious subcultures is Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007).↩
Watt, A Transforming Faith, 4-7, 15-32, 49-154.))↩
Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalists in the City: Conflict and Division in Boston’s Churches, 1885-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3-9, 99, 101-24, 155-76.↩
For expose as journalism, see Kevin Roose, The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009). For expose as memoir, see Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007). Schaeffer’s book is notable only for being the most shameless of the ex-fundamentalist memoirs. For a far more sensitive and sympathetic memoir, used as a means of introduction to the history of fundamentalism, see Brett Grainger, In the World But Not of It: One Family’s Militant Faith and the History of Fundamentalism in America (New York: Walker, 2008). David Harrington Watt, Bible-Carrying Christians: Conservative Protestants and Social Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); James M. Ault, Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).↩ Three volumes of A History of Evangelicalism, published by Inter-Varsity Press, have appeared. The two projected volumes, The Disruption of Evangelicalism: The Age of John R. Mott, J. Gresham Machen and Aimee Semple McPherson, to be written by Geoff Treloar, and The Gobal Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott, to be written by Brian Stanley, will cover the period of American fundamentalism.↩
(I think that all presidents want to do the right thing. Obama has plenty of faults, but he comes the closest of modern presidents to understand the truth expressed in Lonergan’s Law of the Cross. God does not intend to destroy evil, but to transform it. For those who think that God has ordained America to be His instrument of wrath; they are wrong. But, God will bless an America that offers peace and reconciliation to enemies)
President Obama Talks to Thomas L. Friedman About Iraq, Putin and Israel (excerpt for 8/8/2014)
President Obama’s hair is definitely grayer these days, and no doubt trying to manage foreign policy in a world of increasing disorder accounts for at least half of those gray hairs. (The Tea Party can claim the other half.) But having had a chance to spend an hour touring the horizon with him in the White House Map Room late Friday afternoon, it’s clear that the president has a take on the world, born of many lessons over the last six years, and he has feisty answers for all his foreign policy critics.
Obama made clear that he is only going to involve America more deeply in places like the Middle East to the extent that the different communities there agree to an inclusive politics of no victor/no vanquished. The United States is not going to be the air force of Iraqi Shiites or any other faction. Despite Western sanctions, he cautioned, President Vladimir Putin of Russia “could invade” Ukraine at any time, and, if he does, “trying to find our way back to a cooperative functioning relationship with Russia during the remainder of my term will be much more difficult.” Intervening in Libya to prevent a massacre was the right thing to do, Obama argued, but doing it without sufficient follow-up on the ground to manage Libya’s transition to more democratic politics is probably his biggest foreign policy regret.
At the end of the day, the president mused, the biggest threat to America — the only force that can really weaken us — is us. We have so many things going for us right now as a country — from new energy resources to innovation to a growing economy — but, he said, we will never realize our full potential unless our two parties adopt the same outlook that we’re asking of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds or Israelis and Palestinians: No victor, no vanquished and work together.
“Our politics are dysfunctional,” said the president, and we should heed the terrible divisions in the Middle East as a “warning to us: societies don’t work if political factions take maximalist positions. And the more diverse the country is, the less it can afford to take maximalist positions.”
Theologically this is just an expression of Augustine’s “Lust for Power” playing out in politics dominated by money and the influence of money.
While he blamed the rise of the Republican far right for extinguishing so many potential compromises, Obama also acknowledged that gerrymandering, the Balkanization of the news media and uncontrolled money in politics — the guts of our political system today — are sapping our ability to face big challenges together, more than any foreign enemy. “Increasingly politicians are rewarded for taking the most extreme maximalist positions,” he said, “and sooner or later, that catches up with you.”
I began by asking whether if former Secretary of State Dean Acheson was “present at the creation” of the post-World War II order, as he once wrote, did Obama feel present at the “disintegration?”
“First of all, I think you can’t generalize across the globe because there are a bunch of places where good news keeps coming.” Look at Asia, he said, countries like Indonesia, and many countries in Latin America, like Chile. “But I do believe,” he added, “that what we’re seeing in the Middle East and parts of North Africa is an order that dates back to World War I, (and it’s) starting to buckle.”
But wouldn’t things be better had we armed the secular Syrian rebels early or kept U.S. troops in Iraq? The fact is, said the president, in Iraq a residual U.S. troop presence would never have been needed had the Shiite majority there not “squandered an opportunity” to share power with Sunnis and Kurds. “Had the Shia majority seized the opportunity to reach out to the Sunnis and the Kurds in a more effective way, [and not] passed legislation like de-Baathification,” no outside troops would have been necessary. Absent their will to do that, our troops sooner or later would have been caught in the crossfire, he argued.
With “respect to Syria,” said the president, the notion that arming the rebels would have made a difference has “always been a fantasy. This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.”
Even now, the president said, the administration has difficulty finding, training and arming a sufficient cadre of secular Syrian rebels: “There’s not as much capacity as you would hope.”
The “broader point we need to stay focused on,” he added, “is what we have is a disaffected Sunni minority in the case of Iraq, a majority in the case of Syria, stretching from essentially Baghdad to Damascus. ... Unless we can give them a formula that speaks to the aspirations of that population, we are inevitably going to have problems. ... Unfortunately, there was a period of time where the Shia majority in Iraq didn’t fully understand that. They’re starting to understand it now. Unfortunately, we still have ISIL [the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant], which has, I think, very little appeal to ordinary Sunnis.” But “they’re filling a vacuum, and the question for us has to be not simply how we counteract them militarily but how are we going to speak to a Sunni majority in that area ... that, right now, is detached from the global economy.”
Is Iran being helpful? “I think what the Iranians have done,” said the president, “is to finally realize that a maximalist position by the Shias inside of Iraq is, over the long term, going to fail. And that’s, by the way, a broader lesson for every country: You want 100 percent, and the notion that the winner really does take all, all the spoils. Sooner or later that government’s going to break down.”
The only states doing well, like Tunisia, I’ve argued, have done so because their factions adopted the principle of no victor, no vanquished. Once they did, they didn’t need outside help.
“We cannot do for them what they are unwilling to do for themselves,” said the president of the factions in Iraq. “Our military is so capable, that if we put everything we have into it, we can keep a lid on a problem for a time. But for a society to function long term, the people themselves have to make decisions about how they are going to live together, how they are going to accommodate each other’s interests, how they are going to compromise. When it comes to things like corruption, the people and their leaders have to hold themselves accountable for changing those cultures.... ... We can help them and partner with them every step of the way. But we can’t do it for them.”
So, I asked, explain your decision to use military force to protect the refugees from ISIL (which is also known as ISIS) and Kurdistan, which is an island of real decency in Iraq? “When you have a unique circumstance in which genocide is threatened, and a country is willing to have us in there, you have a strong international consensus that these people need to be protected and we have a capacity to do so, then we have an obligation to do so,” said the president. But given the island of decency the Kurds have built, we also have to ask, he added, not just “how do we push back on ISIL, but also how do we preserve the space for the best impulses inside of Iraq, that very much is on my mind, that has been on my mind throughout.
“I do think the Kurds used that time that was given by our troop sacrifices in Iraq,” Obama added. “They used that time well, and the Kurdish region is functional the way we would like to see. It is tolerant of other sects and other religions in a way that we would like to see elsewhere. So we do think it’s important to make sure that that space is protected, but, more broadly, what I’ve indicated is that I don’t want to be in the business of being the Iraqi air force. I don’t want to get in the business for that matter of being the Kurdish air force, in the absence of a commitment of the people on the ground to get their act together and do what’s necessary politically to start protecting themselves and to push back against ISIL.”
The reason, the president added, “that we did not just start taking a bunch of airstrikes all across Iraq as soon as ISIL came in was because that would have taken the pressure off of [Prime Minister Nuri Kamal] al-Maliki.” That only would have encouraged, he said, Maliki and other Shiites to think: " ‘We don’t actually have to make compromises. We don’t have to make any decisions. We don’t have to go through the difficult process of figuring out what we’ve done wrong in the past. All we have to do is let the Americans bail us out again. And we can go about business as usual.’ ”
The president said that what he is telling every faction in Iraq is: “We will be your partners, but we are not going to do it for you. We’re not sending a bunch of U.S. troops back on the ground to keep a lid on things. You’re going to have to show us that you are willing and ready to try and maintain a unified Iraqi government that is based on compromise. That you are willing to continue to build a nonsectarian, functional security force that is answerable to a civilian government. ... We do have a strategic interest in pushing back ISIL. We’re not going to let them create some caliphate through Syria and Iraq, but we can only do that if we know that we’ve got partners on the ground who are capable of filling the void. So if we’re going to reach out to Sunni tribes, if we’re going to reach out to local governors and leaders, they’ve got to have some sense that they’re fighting for something.” Otherwise, Obama said, “We can run [ISIL] off for a certain period of time, but as soon as our planes are gone, they’re coming right back in.”
I asked the president whether he was worried about Israel.
“It is amazing to see what Israel has become over the last several decades,” he answered. “To have scratched out of rock this incredibly vibrant, incredibly successful, wealthy and powerful country is a testament to the ingenuity, energy and vision of the Jewish people. And because Israel is so capable militarily, I don’t worry about Israel’s survival. ... I think the question really is how does Israel survive. And how can you create a State of Israel that maintains its democratic and civic traditions. How can you preserve a Jewish state that is also reflective of the best values of those who founded Israel. And, in order to do that, it has consistently been my belief that you have to find a way to live side by side in peace with Palestinians. ... You have to recognize that they have legitimate claims, and this is their land and neighborhood as well.”
Asked whether he should be more vigorous in pressing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, to reach a land-for-peace deal, the president said, it has to start with them. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “poll numbers are a lot higher than mine” and “were greatly boosted by the war in Gaza,” Obama said. “And so if he doesn’t feel some internal pressure, then it’s hard to see him being able to make some very difficult compromises, including taking on the settler movement. That’s a tough thing to do. With respect to Abu Mazen, it’s a slightly different problem. In some ways, Bibi is too strong [and] in some ways Abu Mazen is too weak to bring them together and make the kinds of bold decisions that Sadat or Begin or Rabin were willing to make. It’s going to require leadership among both the Palestinians and the Israelis to look beyond tomorrow. ... And that’s the hardest thing for politicians to do is to take the long view on things.”
Clearly, a lot of the president’s attitudes on Iraq grow out the turmoil unleashed in Libya by NATO’s decision to topple Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, but not organize any sufficient international follow-on assistance on the ground to help them build institutions. Whether it is getting back into Iraq or newly into Syria, the question that Obama keeps coming back to is: Do I have the partners — local and/or international — to make any improvements we engineer self-sustaining?
“I’ll give you an example of a lesson I had to learn that still has ramifications to this day,” said Obama. “And that is our participation in the coalition that overthrew Qaddafi in Libya. I absolutely believed that it was the right thing to do. ... Had we not intervened, it’s likely that Libya would be Syria. ... And so there would be more death, more disruption, more destruction. But what is also true is that I think we [and] our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force if you’re going to do this. Then it’s the day after Qaddafi is gone, when everybody is feeling good and everybody is holding up posters saying, ‘Thank you, America.’ At that moment, there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies that didn’t have any civic traditions. ... So that’s a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question, ‘Should we intervene, militarily? Do we have an answer [for] the day after?’ ”