ExFundie

It’s probably not entirely accurate to say that Christian fundamentalism thinks all history apart from its own is completely unimportant. But most fundamentalisms tend to believe that their own history is the defining story for the rest of humanity. Their God is the only God, and their revelation is either the only acceptable revelation, or the last and final word, capping and giving the final meaning to all revelation that came before.

So you have Christians saying that their “New Testament” books explain, complement, and complete all the revelation in what they call the “Old Testament” – the Law, the Prophets, and the Sayings of the Jews. The Mormons come along and add the Book of Mormon, which supposedly gives the final revelation to top the Bibles of the Jews and Christians. The Muslims’ book, the Qur’an, purports to tell many Biblical stories the way they really happened, since the Jews’ and Christians’ books have somehow “corrupted” them, and the Qur’an is now the only and final authority about the real God, Allah. (And amusingly, even the Baha’is, who are much less fundamentalist than most other religions, accepting other religions as true ways to God, still claim that their own scriptures “really” give the pure explanations about God, topping other scriptures, and incidentally being the very last word (yet again) on the matter.)

So it’s typical of a fundamentalist religion to regard its own story as The History That Matters, not just to themselves but to the whole world. And everything else has, at best, a secondary status.

Christian fundamentalists regard the history of all nations and races, apart from the ones they’re concerned with, as an illustration of just how badly human beings do when they lose touch with God. Since the world view and beliefs contained in the Bible are the One Truth, cultures and religions teaching anything else are false by definition. But Christians must then explain how other beliefs and cultures came into being, since they apparently began at the same place, and with the same knowledge, as the forerunners of the Cultures That Matter.

You can probably guess how they explain these variations. As usual, the answer is not primarily a matter of diversity, geography, difference of interpretation, or anything like that. No, the answer, as in everything else, is a matter of sinful moral choice.

According to Christian fundamentalism, those other cultures are the result of their populations’ deliberate attempt to deny God and avoid the responsibility of relating properly to him. They did, indeed, start with the same knowledge of God as all other cultures descended from Noah and his sons. But the ones that chose to deny God began a long spiral into sin, darkness, and corruption of the One Truth.

This sweeps away all cultural developments, all governments, all scientific and artistic achievements – everything. If a culture, say, in what later became China was the first to create paper, or pasta, this must have happened only because despite their sin, the people of China still retained glimmers of the image of God inside them. The great architecture of China, India, Greece, Egypt – clinically beautiful, but all essentially worthless because none of it was done to the honor of God or in knowledge of him.

Philosophies and religious thought are even more firmly dismissed. If a philosophy has developed that tries to teach justice and mercy for one’s fellow humans (Confucianism, for example; or the Laws of Hammurabi), again this must only have happened because there’s a glimmer of the image of God still inside human beings. In their groping around in the darkness, they still sometimes hit on bits of The Truth. But all these philosophies are basically man-centered, so again, they are worthless.

But – but – some philosophies and theologies aren’t “man-centered” at all, surely. There are a great many world belief systems that put God, or gods, at the center, and treat human beings as even less valuable than Christian fundamentalism does. Surely those can’t fall into the same category?

Of course they do, because they do not promote the Christian God. They are the most insidious philosophies of all, because they acknowledge human beings’ innate sinfulness and their need for a right relationship to God – but they substitute a human-created “god” for the real God. Anything, anything to avoid the real God and the real issue, which is their rebellion against him. Even when these cultures go so far as to admit they have a problem when it comes to the divine Creator – their human pride drives them to do anything to avoid bending the knee to him.

Even a polytheistic (many gods) belief system will have started with the same knowledge of the One God as did all descendants of Noah. But in their avoidance of God, they will gradually have allowed this knowledge to be obscured. And yet, the spiritual impulse was still there. So they began inventing other divine explanations for the mysteries of the world. Yet none of these man-made divinities was ever sufficient to explain the world, so the deities would gradually be multiplied. The original monotheistic knowledge fragmented and splintered until there was a multitude of gods and spirits and divinities.

But there are clues, say the fundamentalists, that this polytheism did begin as monotheism – the knowledge of the One God. In every polytheistic culture, they say, you can trace farther and farther back till you discover a belief that originally there was only One God. For Hindus, one of the big candidates could be Dyaus, an ancient sky god (though in fact there are many myths about one original god, and the stories are very different from each other, and there are many candidates). Dyaus is a candidate partly because he fits the “one god” profile in many ways, but also because he can be linked to Zeus of the Greeks, and Jupiter of the Romans (“Dyaus” and “Zeus” are from the same root word, and “Jupiter” comes from something like “Dyaus piter” [father god]). There are other explanations for this linkage – the fact, for instance, that the Indo-Aryan, Greek, and Roman cultures are all Indo-European cultures whose languages descended from the same proto-language – but no, the “real” explanation is that they were all originally talking about the One True God.

There are other primal gods that the fundamentalists point to as evidence of an original knowledge of the One God. For example, Viracocha of the Incas, who supposedly was a god above and behind all the other gods.

So the fundamentalists believe that every polytheistic culture began with a belief in the One God, and this belief degenerated and splintered into a belief in many gods.

There is also the matter of the legends of the Great Flood. This, for fundamentalists, is a major pointer to an original knowledge that was lost. Almost every culture in the world has such a legend, with a flood covering the entire known world, and a few human survivors, usually helped in their escape by a divinity. Certainly, one possible explanation might be the fact that every culture probably had some type of catastrophic flooding in its past history, but for fundamentalists, these legends are a racial memory of the Great Flood. It was such a catastrophic event in human history that every culture remembers it in some form. This legend is proof, for fundamentalists, that despite all of humanity’s attempts to pretend, they can’t entirely lose their knowledge of the One Truth. It still comes back to haunt them, making them accountable for rejecting it.

Then there is another biggie: the dying god. Many, many cultures have this idea among their myths. For Christian fundamentalists, this proves that these cultures have found it impossible to forget that God promised the Redeemer. They have twisted the promise till it fits into their own false religions, but they cannot eradicate it. Balder, Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, the Sacred King – everywhere, the dying divinity appears. But all reverence shown to him is within a man-made context, and therefore wicked. Yet these stories do serve as reminders of the promise so that there is no excuse, when a culture finally hears about the real Redeemer (Jesus), for their then rejecting him.

And by the way, returning to the idea of linguistic convergence – that the farther back you go, the closer and closer languages converge until you find the One Original Language – this idea fits perfectly with the fundamentalists’ claim that all cultures really did descend from the one original culture that knew God. They, of course, trace the split in languages back to the Tower of Babel, but for them, the convergence is proof that their beliefs about the descent of cultures are true.

So. What are the implications of this overview and interpretation of world cultures?

First – every religion is false. Not only false, but evil, because it was of man-made design, attempting to sidestep the question of human sin and rebellion against the One True God. In fact, every religion is not just evil, but outright degenerate. Fundamentalists look at the strange gods of Hinduism, for example, with their multiple arms and their weird adventures, and see demons. They will see the same thing in all mythologies that are so different from Christian myth – the Japanese tales of ice vampires and demons, Chinese tales of dragon gods – the stranger they are to western Christian mythical views, the more “demonic” they are interpreted to be, simply by definition.

Also, every non-Christian culture is evil at its root. And again, not just evil, but outright degenerate. Christian fundamentalists take special delight in discovering artistic and architectural achievements that were accomplished in the past, but could not now be repeated by the indigenous culture. The pyramids, for example, or some of the great ancient buildings of Zimbabwe. These, say the fundamentalists, were produced when those cultures were much less darkened by sin and degradation, but their subsequent degeneration has made them incapable of such things now.

Christian fundamentalists are particularly prone to point to Africa, to what they have called “savages” – “look at those people, half-naked and dirty, who only have the intelligence to build grass huts now, but once were mentally capable of conceiving great structures. They have obviously degenerated almost to the level of animals! Look what sin eventually produces in human cultures!” When the first missionaries spoke of going to “Darkest Africa,” they did not mean “a continent we don’t know very well” when they used the word “dark.” They meant “morally dark and degenerated.” It is also not surprising, then, that slavery of Africans could be justified from the Bible with a completely straight face.

Firm and coldly rational racism is pretty much inevitable when fundamentalism holds the view that its own story is the History That Matters, while everyone else has degenerated due to sin. Since Christianity has risen and gained power through the centuries mostly through the white, western races, it has been easy and logical to assume that the white races have remained much closer to the original purity of Man, while the races that were not the receptacles and fosterers of Christianity are intrinsically more degenerate and impure, and probably even less human.

Another ramification of fundamentalist belief about other cultures: their artistic achievements are of much less value. As always, morality is intrinsic to everything. So a piece of art that is used in the service of a foreign god, or is even a depiction of that god, however beautiful it is, is evil. For this reason, the fundamentalist Muslim Taliban could explode the beautiful and priceless Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, because Buddhism is a “false religion.” For this reason also, a Christian fundamentalist can destroy works of art without a qualm, because the art works are supposedly promoting the belief in false gods.

Even if the art is not explicitly religious, it is evil because it comes from a non-Christian culture, period. So that a North American Christian fundamentalist can hear music from India, and because it is so foreign to his own cultural musical ear, and because he has pre-defined India as an “evil culture,” he can immediately dismiss it as demonic music. The ancient painting styles of Japan – wrong. The twisted and strange sculptures of the Mayans – obviously demonic. And those jungle rhythms that became rock ‘n’ roll music? Fundamentalists have devised all sorts of theories claiming that those rhythms actually affect and harm the natural rhythms of the body and that’s “really” why they disapprove of the music – but the root reason, I suspect, is that the music and rhythms originated with non-white, non-Christian cultures. Which, of course, are inferior because they abandoned God, millennia ago.

It is too simplistic to say that the Christian fundamentalist attitude is, “We are better than you, our beliefs are better than your beliefs, and our God is better than your gods.” That is the surface manifestation of the even deeper attitude: “You were us, your belief was our belief, and you did know the True God. But you rejected the truth and preferred darkness and evil instead.”

And this, finally, is one of the great impulses for the colonization of the world by cultures based in Christianity. Yes, the main impulse (as with many non-Christian cultures in the past) was probably sheer economics. But much of the justification the European colonizing cultures used was based in the Christian view that theirs was the History That Mattered in the divine scheme, and that all other cultures were somehow morally and humanly inferior. This meant they could be exploited, but it also meant that they must be converted, and “lifted up” from the darkness, degradation, and evil into which they had sunk for so many centuries.

This is why most fundamentalists do not believe they are racists. They are trying to do good to these cultures, by “bringing them back” to God and lifting them out of darkness. But the racism beneath their good deeds is always ready to boil out at the first rejection. A fundamentalist soldier may believe he is doing Christian work, trying to “free the Iraqis” and open the way for them to hear the Gospel, but just let the Iraqis not show appropriate gratitude, just let them cling to their “false” Islamic beliefs, and that fundamentalist soldier will probably hate them very quickly for “rejecting freedom and rejecting God.” It will suddenly be much easier to blow their brains out, or torture them in an Iraqi prison. In that case, he will become God’s instrument of judgement, and those Iraqis will deserve it because they stubbornly cling to their rebellion against God.

Taking it in reverse, this was why the 9/11 hijackers so fervently believed they were doing God’s work in taking more than 3,000 lives with those planes. In their view, we are the inferior, degraded culture, while Islamic history is the History That Matters. They were Allah’s instruments of judgement, since we continue to cling to false beliefs and refuse to return to the true Creator. We are the ones who have invented a counterfeit, to avoid our responsibility to repent.

Although there are two possible ways to interpret all the above-noted cultural similarities as well as the differences, a fundamentalist will always choose the second way.

The first interpretation is that since we are all human, it is inevitable that the cultures we create through history will have many similarities in belief, in the types of stories we tell, in what we value. The similar myths – the dying god, the flood, the uber-god – repeat themselves in various cultures because the human psyche is prone to creating such stories. Meanwhile, differences in culture will develop as groups become isolated from each other and interact with their environment and live their own history. This view easily accounts for both the similarities and the differences.

The second interpretation (which the fundamentalist will always choose) is that despite the many similarities among cultures, only one of the cultures is the real history – and all others are merely copies and counterfeits or, at best, pointers away from themselves to the History That Matters. Differences in culture develop simply because Everyone Else Is Wrong.

Small wonder that the historical relations of any fundamentalist culture with all other cultures are so consistently nasty.

But, just as a final aside, it is also not hard to see how Christian fundamentalists’ view of their own history dovetails so easily with the “Me first, at everyone else’s expense” form of rabid capitalism they currently espouse. But we will deal with that in a later essay.

For now, we have finally come to the Crux (literally) of everything. All of pre-history and world history have been working toward this moment. And so we proceed to the most important person in (Christian) fundamentalist history: Jesus Christ the promised Redeemer.

Next: Jesus Christ was Not a Good Man

Back to: Interjection: All Will Be Revealed