Why Liberals Are Weak When Faced with Fundamentalism

Liberal intellectuals recoil from the obvious manifestations of scriptural fundamentalism, yet they continue to admire the very culture that produced it. The inheritors of the Enlightenment, they trace their own dissenting, intellectual ancestry from the very society that successfully promoted scriptural literalism and inerrancy. Liberals continue, that is, to accept the Whig interpretation of sixteenth-century Protestant reading: they continue to maintain that this was a grounding moment of the liberal tradition, when the ordinary reader could read the Bible for him or herself, when the individual gained freedom from the disciplines of an always oppressive institution. Liberals also routinely dismiss fundamentalism as an incomprehensible historical throwback. They present fundamentalism as the product of some weird historical warp that has thrown “conservative” reading practices into the realm of what should be a neat and tidy modernity, swept clean by the broom of the Enlightenment. 

All these persuasions need to be scrutinized. The liberal tradition needs to revise its genealogy from sixteenth-century Protestantism, and it needs to understand that scriptural literalism is not some ghastly “medieval” revenant. Its extraordinary contemporary vigor attests, on the contrary, to its status as a creature of modernity itself, an alternative to Enlightenment modernity. As we approach (as we enter, indeed) the second wave of fundamentalist reading in the West, not to speak of the Middle East, we should understand how the first wave produced a century and more of European violence, from 1517 to, say, 1648. We ignore understanding our religious history, and particularly the history of religious reading, at our own contemporary peril.

We should abandon simplistic, Whig accounts of sixteenth-century reformers, accounts that have received powerful restatement in recent English historiography. In particular we should abandon the following rock-hard persuasions of the liberal tradition: that Luther believed that readers should interpret the Bible freely, making up their own minds about the truth of Scripture; that Luther placed the liberating text of Scripture above the institution of the Church; and that Lutheran theology is more “democratic.”

Instead, we would be well advised to reread Luther and his vigorous English followers, especially William Tyndale (c. 1494-1536). There we discover that the Lutheran moment was the source of fundamentalism, and the source of different kinds of persecutory violence. Most obviously, Lutheran reading practice provoked violence against its stated enemies; more surprisingly, it also provoked psychological violence, paranoia and permanent schism within its own adherents. In many ways the Lutheran program turns out to produce a bad news Bible.

How? Luther detested what he called “private interpretation.” He promoted, instead, a movement that repudiated interpretation itself. A recurrent theme in Lutheran theology is that Scripture interprets itself. Scripture is not, and cannot be subject to the messy negotiations of history in which all other texts are immersed. It does its own interpreting (i.e. Scripture interprets itself, but my interpretation is right).

Neither did Luther place the text of Scripture above and before the Church, despite frequently proclaiming that he does exactly that. Instead, his position is that one has to be a member of the True Church, the Church of the Elect, before one can be a good reader (how else can we explain the fact that so many readers get what should be an entirely open and incontrovertible Scripture wrong?).

Neither are Luther and his followers democrats, by any stretch of the imagination. The “politics” of their theology is stridently absolutist, with God holding all the initiative and decision making, regardless of the worth of individual Christians, who are, in any case, radically incapable of exercising free will and free choice. How could Christians choose, abject and infected as they are by original sin? No, Christians could not be relied on to elect the boss (democracy); it was instead the boss who elected them (predestination).

Luther’s theology, then, posited an exclusivist and extraordinarily demanding institution (the invisible, True Church of the Elect) as the precondition of any “good” reading. This is where the individual reader’s grievous psychological stress emerges; it’s also whence the schismactic, even paranoid quality of evangelical experience derives.

For if one was saved only by God’s predestinarian grace, the difficulty lay in knowing whether or not one had been chosen. One couldn’t materially advance one’s chances, since the decision had been taken; all one could do was to search for signs of which way the decision had gone. Spiritual experience becomes less a matter of works in the world and more a matter of exhaustively scrutinizing the world, and the Bible, for signs of one’s own fate. The limpid, straightforward text of Scripture was surrounded and invaded, that is, by illegible signs and portents (have I been saved?). 

Spiritual experience becomes less a matter of slow accretions of virtuous action in the world, and more a matter of sudden, born-again conversions. The past is rejected and the Christian energized by the gratitude any newly elected member of an exclusive club feels.

Exclusivism based on literal understanding of the Bible itself produces, however, more exclusions. Literalism is both the child and the parent of distrust: the new born evangelical convert learns to distrust both his or her own persuasion of personal salvation (self-persuasion is the hardest psychological trick, after all). He or she will also distrust others who feel certain they are elected members of the True Church. Put two readers of any complex text together and you’ve got two differing interpretations. If those two readers can appeal only to the literal sense, then those two divergent evangelical interpretations inevitably lead to schism.

I am here describing sixteenth-century phenomena, without any necessary reference to contemporary evangelical and/or fundamentalist practices in the United States. Historically the Protestant tradition has much to be immensely proud of, but those achievements are, I suggest, born more from unpredictable historical paradoxes than directly from the sources of Protestant culture. And certainly the Christian Right in the United States, with its individualist, social-Darwinist economics, its idolatry (of the God Bless America kind), and its unshakeable sense of having been elected, conforms in many ways to the exclusivist, distrustful culture that took shape in the sixteenth century. It’s time that the liberal tradition confronted fundamentalists more directly, rather than just wishing they’d go away. For that confrontation to be successful, liberals need to rewrite the genealogy of their tradition.