The Thirty Years War clarified what happens when christian fundamentalism rules, catholic or protestant. Up to eight million people were killed in the name of Jesus; christian against christian. In some parts of Europe half the population was eradicated. One of the upshots of the bloodshed was exhaustion, and another was the rise of secularism. People realized that theocracies aren't recipes for peace and prosperity; Locke, Voltaire, and other philosophes in England and France began advocating tolerance as an alternative, and human rights. That was a major point of the Enlightenment: acceptance of religious diversity; of other forms of being; and of the insights of science.
By the eighteenth century Puritans had already established a foothold on the American continent and as a rule didn't care about tolerance or empirical insights; they felt their bible taught them everything they needed to know. Even the founding fathers, mainly deists, were tainted enough by Puritan custom that, for all their talk of freedom and the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they were content to allow slavery as an institution and keep women and the unlanded from political power. I would argue it's a fault of any rupture from old, inbred thinking, namely that it imagines a new way––it talks a good game––but its ability to affect real change is limited by ages-old practice. The work of palpable progress comes after, over centuries, once the gauntlet of change has been thrown.
Until Trump we in this country had been wrestling with that project, with what it might mean to grant real and not theoretical rights to women and racial minorities; queer people; religious minorities; atheists; the other-abled; immigrants; non-human animals; the environment; and much more. Though there's still a long way to go it seemed we were getting somewhere, toward a world that took its cues about human identity not from an antique book with its inherent flaws but from science-based thinking about the nature of things, leading to a whole new ethics.
But fundamentalism is entrenched in the U.S., and anti-pluralist as a rule––which begs logic given the fragmented history of the biblical texts themselves. The core of contemporary bibles was constructed largely in the fourth century, from hundreds of disparate "candidates," so one would expect contradictions, as Elaine Pagels points out in The Gnostic Gospels. Given the somewhat frankensteinian character of the new-testament texts, sutured together as they are, one would also expect to find a broad range of interpretations, which is a feature of all texts, religious or not. And I suppose one could also expect a lot of making-things-up as well, that is when the texts fail to say what one wants. For example, though the Jesus figure in the christian stories never mentions abortion or homosexuality––or many other realities of contemporary culture––christians have created castles in the sky around those subjects all the same. It's true that Paul has something to say about what people call homosexuality, though anyone who knows John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality knows it's much more complicated than they let on; in fact it didn't exist in biblical times, not in the same way it does today.
The bigger questions is what do with biblical bias in the context of a secular democracy, again derived as an alternative to theocracy. What to do when the majority believes, for example, that terminating a pregnancy before fifteen or twenty weeks does not constitute murder. Or that LGTBQ folk deserve the same rights as others. As we've seen only too clearly, the reaction of fundamentalists has been to take control of the levers of government and force their views on the entire body politic; to basically say the hell with tolerance and democracy both (it's important to keep in mind that the conservative make-up of the current supreme court was engineered by Republicans).
But one need only look to the Project 2025 Manual, which states things clearly, namely that "sexual orientation and identity ('SOGI')" need to be deleted from the cultural discourse in this country, along with "diversity, equity, and inclusion" generally (36). If anyone thinks the language is merely symbolic and not a real-world vision or intention, then think again. In a recent interview with Amna Nawaz on the PBS News Hour, Michael Knowles, a conservative catholic, called for the elimination of queer people from the culture:
"AN: You have . . . said previously that [transgenderism] should be eradicated from public life entirely. . . . Michael, you realize this is the same argument people made about gay people, right?
MK: Well, I'm talking about the whole LGBT ideology. So I suppose, in some ways, I'm making that argument . . . .
AN: When you use words like eradicate…
MK: Well, you know what the word eradicate means." (2/20/25)
In fact we do know from German history what the word "eradicate" means. What's interesting is that given the high-voltage field around words like it, fundamentalists choose to employ it openly nevertheless, beyond a mere wink or dog whistle.
The secular, Enlightenment discourse, flawed as it was in practice originally and the basis for the U.S. constitution, was for all its shortcomings in fact predicated on the idea of individual rights. That includes right-wing christian fundamentalists, protestant or catholic––if they think abortion is murder or that queer people are doomed to fry, it's their right to believe it. In which case they mightn't want to get an abortion or live a queer lifestyle––no one wants to take that from them. The problem arises when those individuals attempt to force their beliefs on others, including women, gay, and trans people; Muslims and Jews; and others.
The New York Times featured an article recently about the views of Aaron Renn, who coined the term "negative world" to describe the atmosphere christians in America find themselves today ("He Gave a Name to What Many Christians Feel," 3/6/26). I'm tempted to reply, Try walking a mile in the shoes of any LGBTQ person. They can tell you what a negative world feels like. What it's like to have your relationship diminished or ignored; to have your existence called a phase; to live in fear of the government taking your marital rights away; to have survived a pandemic that the majority ignored, at least initially, leading to over 100,000 deaths in the U.S. in the 1980s alone; to be completely eradicated as a trans person bureaucratically; to be forced to live a lie; to endure the cruelty of conversion therapy; to live in fear of physical violence, or of bullying as a young person––the list goes on. What christian lives with any of that? The bigotry that many, though not all, christians spew creates a world for queer people that is much worse than simply "negative." Indeed it puts them in a state of uncertainty at best and at worst in fear for their lives. Which is the opposite of what citizenship in a democracy is meant to afford.
Comments