TO FUNDAMENTALISTS, WE'RE ALL PHILISTINES

From Lance Mannion courtesy of Emphasis Added:

The moral calculus decent people measure their behavior by is this:

Some acts are sins. People who commit those acts are sinners. I have commited one of those acts. I am a sinner.

These conservatives probably think they use the same measure. But they don't, because they start with the belief that it is impossible for them to commit those bad acts because bad acts are what others do. Crime is the act of others. Sin is the moral failure of others.

So their personal moral calculus winds up looking like this:

Good people do good things. Bad people do bad things and bad people are the others. I am one of the good people. Therefore the things I do must be good.

This is why if Jesus were around today and a woman taken in adultery ran to him for protection and he said to the crowd, Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone, forty-six Republican adulterers would bean her with rocks.

Cheating on your spouse is something Democrats do.

Click here for the rest.

Shakespeare's Sister suggests that this "moral calculus" stems from the born-again concept of clean slate. That is, it's easier for fundamentalists to be judgmental because they have been forgiven of their sins, and therefore on the side of righteousness:

They don't just see you and I and everyone else as a sinner, a criminal, separate from themselves; they see themselves in two pieces—the sinner, the criminal, the dead self that was bad, now gone through being born again, replaced with the new self who is good, and God-full, and gifted with the ability to avoid the same pitfalls that the old self knew so well.

I agree that this concept is in play somehow for fundamentalists. However, having once been a Southern Baptist myself, I think that both Mannion and Sister give the religious right too much credit. That is, I don't think fundementalists are thinking about this stuff at all--these two essays do a nice job of describing how their logic works (or doesn't work as the case actually is), but if you ran these ideas past a few born-again types, they'd totally disagree--"What do you mean 'I don't think I'm a sinner?' Of course I'm a sinner. I'm not perfect; I just have a close walk with the One who is."

I had a fundamentalist buddy years ago at a restaurant where I worked who once dropped a slogan on me that had apparently been floating around the evangelical "Bible church" he attended: "We are aliens, not of this world." I think his statement hits much closer to the truth. That is, the moral calculus going on with the religious right is nothing more than simple tribalism. As with the above theories, no self-respecting fundamentalist would ever agree with me on this, but having seen how things are on the inside, it's undeniable. Fundamentalists so strongly believe that their understanding of the universe is right, and that "the world," dominated by Satan who was given Earthly dominion by God, persecutes them for being righteous, that a bunker mentality is hard to avoid. To the fundamentalists, it's everybody versus them, and only they are on the right side.

Compounding matters, and providing an archetypal narrative for Christian understanding, is the endless stream of Old Testament stories about the persecution of "God's children," the Israelites, that are the meat and potatoes of evangelical sermons: born-agains invariably liken their situation on the world stage to the travails of the original Twelve Tribes. And what did "God's children" do whenever they had the upper hand? They essentially committed genocide, destroying their enemies utterly, down to the last woman and child, all with the Lord's blessing, of course.

The Bible does, indeed, go on and on about "sin" and how to avoid its wages (i.e., "the wages of sin is death"), and all serious fundamentalists are well schooled in their salvation discourse, but as a poststructuralist might say, that's just another discourse. Right-wing Christians generally don't seem to dwell on such ideas much further than "being saved," or "bringing souls to the Lord." The true philosophical emphasis among evangelicals is in terms of smiting the wicked, and "wicked" is defined as it was defined for the Israelites, that is, everybody who is not one of them. It's old school tribalism, plain and simple.

These people are paranoid beyond all reason, and truly believe that everyone is out to get them: that's why fundamentalists, despite the teachings of Jesus, feel completely free to be as judgmental as they are. From their point of view, they're not really talking about human beings such as themselves. From their point of view, we're all Philistines, and need to be completely destroyed. And they believe that day is coming soon.

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