Fundamentalism : Articles of Faith
Threat leads to two distinct reactions: fear and curiosity. If you have a cat, you will be well aware of the interplay of these two responses. Toss a new toy to your cat and she will recoil in fear and mistrust: a very sound survival strategy. After a short while, she will cautiously approach the enigma and test its likelihood of threat before asserting her dominance over it by batting it around the room. Eventually, she may come to curl up with it like some precious possession or ignore it like every other expensive toy you have ever bought for her. For fundamentalists, curiosity is not an option but a threat.
Whether they live in a small town in France, a trailer park in Oklahoma, or a farm in Southern Alberta, I believe that rural, fundamentalists are motivated by fear of the unknown and caught in the grips of power elites, both religious and secular. This results in xenophobia and racism and a flight to the comfort of scripture and tradition. About as far from your cat’s curiosity as you’re going to get. I have always found it intriguing that people who espouse love and forgiveness and charity on a weekly basis in their places of worship can burn with such white hot hatred. I can only surmise that a similar white hot fear grips the minds of those who have been convinced that the threat they fear is real, palpable, and deadly.
Unless you become like these . . .
Fear, the inducer of the fight or flight response, sparks our imagination to ascribe danger to the object of our fear, often causing us to inflate the true threat of the fear inducing object. The fear of the rural fundamentalist is palpably apparent in the hatred that his fear evokes. Consider the poster boy of extreme fundamentalism: the Westboro Baptist Church. Whereas the bulk of Christian churches at least give lip service to the idea of a ‘loving God’, this group exudes nothing but hatred, censure, and condemnation. And, although other fundamentalist churches would protest most loudly at being compared to the Westboro clan, their followers are at times indistinguishable from these hate merchants.
How about the flight response? Think bison! If you want to move a herd quickly and not give them time to appreciate their own best interests you do what some Native Americans did: you stampede them. Once thundering in blind fear, the herd can be directed by a few well placed members of the tribe to run over the nearest cliff and provide enough bison burgers to last the winter. Power elites use the same strategy as Native Americans did but with populations. Homogenous groups such as fundamentalists, because of their herd mentality, are easiest to work with.
Yale
Delivering the voltage.
A recently repeated Yale study from the 1960s may also give some indication as to why otherwise reasonable, caring people can be morphed into a horde of self righteous bigots. The original experiment by Milgram ( http://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html ) showed that, when instructed by an authority figure and released of responsibility for their actions, a majority (65%) of people were able to deliver near lethal doses of electric current to a complete stranger and 100% were able to deliver the second highest voltage. In the follow-up experiment reported in March, 2017, fully 90% of participants delivered the highest voltage.
The conclusion that researchers reached, in both cases was that vested authority was almost unconditionally obeyed if that authority also absolved the subject of responsibility for his/her actions. Religious fundamentalists are led by religious leaders who more than fit the criteria for directing their actions and opinions. And those leaders themselves are absolved of responsibility because they are merely obeying God’s word (as they see it). If the leaders are political rather than religious, such as the case of a President who panders to Constitutional fundamentalists, the implications are even more dire.
One interpretation of the experiment’s results involves belief perseverance as an underlying determinant. This explanation posits that one of the basic human needs is for continuity. This explains why fundamentalists persist in malevolent beliefs even when leaders who inculcated those beliefs are seen to be malicious, insincere and in conflict even with the basic tenets of belief. This explains why a creature like Donald Trump, who deceived both the religious and constitutional fundamentalists, can continue to hold their support in the face of obvious deception. The need for his followers to maintain the stability of their beliefs is more essential even than contrary real world experience.
My maternal relatives are small town Austrians (so are my paternal relatives but they don’t factor in here because they’re commies). They are afraid that they will be raped by Muslims, that their dirndls will be supplanted by burqas, and that their oompapa will be replaced with strains of ululating Arab folk music. My sister was seriously musing about buying a gun to protect her from the marauding hordes that were poised to overrun her small hamlet; in the meanwhile, she and my niece regaled me with unsubstantiated tales of Muslim atrocities. But this is the lifeblood of those with fears rather than experience – they latch onto narratives that confirm their irrational angst, then propagate them across their network of like-minded relatives and acquaintances.
And that’s where they’re stuck: where we are all stuck, Fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Muslims locked in a Holy War that no one will admit is going on and neither side will contemplate surrender in – how do you surrender your systems of beliefs when they are your sine qua non? How does my sister sit down with a Muslim at her kitchen table and try to find some rapprochement? How do we stop this new endless war without the abdication of one side or the other? How do we bring the world to understand that the underlying purpose of fundamentalism is to divide rather than unify and move beyond faith to understanding?
Hell if I know!
