The Rise of Politics in Religious Fundamentalism

In the past few years, there has been a steady rise in the visibility of religious fundamentalists, especially in the realm of politics.

In the United States, we have seen people like Pat Robertson and other "Christian Evangelists" taking runs at the Presidency, largely on the strength of their public name as religious leaders. The current president, G. W. Bush is himself a self-avowed "born-again" Christian.

We are seeing political lobby organization emerge in both Canada and the United States that are clearly rooted in the so-called "Christian Right Wing" (e.g. "Focus on Family", or "Concerned Christians Canada"; in Ontario, there are experiments with allowing Muslims to apply "Sharia Law" in the civil legal system; in various countries in the Middle East and North Africa, we see "Islamic Fundamentalist" governments holding power.

Per se, none of these things particularly bother me, until I encounter the rigid, immovable belief structures that seem to evolve around religions. It is always easier for someone to be "conservative" about something than it is to accept or embrace change. Like it or lump it, that's just the reality of belief systems. So, when the Anglican church brings down a report that is essentially a "verbal spanking" to a Canadian congregation that blessed a 'same-sex union', and the US Episcopalian church for affirming a gay Bishop, it really comes as no real surprise to me.

As I expected, phrases like "incompatible with scripture" and other lofty self-justifications are used. Perhaps it is the "incompatible with scripture" argument that I find most intriguing here. Superficially, it's almost innocuous; but when you dig a bit deeper, I believe it becomes more significant, for just about every "moral" argument that is based on religious belief seems to boil down to this eventually. Whether the issue is abortion, gay marriage, creation versus evolution or even plain gender equality, the religious opposition seems to become remarkably shrill and strident in their condemnation.

It is easy to be dismissive and simply claim that the religious argument is irrelevant and largely hysterical when put in the face of "rational fact". However, that is not the underlying point at all. In fact, I don't want to "dismiss" those arguments, but rather probe the roots of their origins and the shrillness with which their advocates put them forward.

If we look around the world we live in, it becomes pretty clear that a great deal has changed in the last 2500 years or more - empires have risen and fallen; entire nations have emerged and vanished; species found and lost; languages have changed; society has changed most of all.

In the case of Christianity, Islam and Judaism, all three religions base their core beliefs on scripture that was penned somewhere between 1500 and 4000 years in the past. (Depending on which set of rubber rulers you use to measure the age of the origianl sources) The most diehard advocates of these religions argue that their scriptures are at least divinely inspired, or possibly that God directly told the authors what to write. Since I have no rational means to demonstrate the validity of this, I am going to assume that at some level, human intellect and will came into play in the authoring of the various books of scripture.

Chances are very good that in writing scripture, very real and human frailties influenced its precise wording. Just as I believe that I live in the best possible society the world has ever seen, so would have the original authors of that scripture have thought of themselves. Therefore, the odds are that they would have recorded values and assumptions relevant to their time and place.

Here we are several millenia later, living in a world where the amount of knowledge and understanding we have about the variety and richness of human experience has changed dramatically. 2000 years ago, we could set bones, and suture wounds - but could we treat cancers? No. That far back, we were still engaging in public animal sacrifices - today such practices are nearly unheard of outside of a few odd pockets of religious practice. Where most "western" societies have long ago adopted the notion of gender equality, the scriptures almost exclusively speak of the woman as if she is subservient to the male.

So - what do we have happening? Society has changed, but scripture hasn't. Worse, those charged with interpreting scripture - the clergy - have failed on the whole to interpret scripture effectively in the light of new knowledge and understanding. I would suggest that in fact the scriptural basis of all three major "monotheistic" religions is in fact encountering very fundamental limitations. Simply put, the cumulative effect of societal change over the last two thousand years alone has rendered it nearly impossible to interpret scripture effectively when confronted with new moral and ethical issues.

For example, consider the notion of stem cell research. Here is a realm of biological research that is rooted in some very exotic, and difficult to understand biology. The fact that it requires 'pre-differentiated' that has to be grown in a petri dish makes it very ethically and morally sensitive. Some argue that as soon as sperm and egg meet, life begins; others view the 'pre-differentiated' blob of cellular matter to be simply a collection of cells. Scripture talks about life, but it does not talk about when life begins, or when you can consider it viable (much less human). Simply put, the line here is so fine, and so indistinct, that there is no chance that anyone 2000+ years ago could possibly have anticipated it and written clearly about it. In fact, I find it hard enough to predict what I'm going to have for dinner tonight, let alone what the world will look like in 2000 years.

For all that it is deeply troubling, especially to the practitioners of these religions, we may well be looking at a period where the major religions in the world begin to wane. Just as the weight of time eventually rendered the "Greco-Roman" pantheon of gods irrelevant, we may be seeing the rise of an era where the singular, inflexible god of monotheistic religions becomes irrelevant. The shrillness with which the 'fundamentalists' oppose various topics may well be simply a symptom of an underlying ailment for these religions. Time and inflexibility have rendered them unable to adapt to the world in which they exist - as with all such things, eventually they die out. (Not always quietly)

I don't believe that any religion is going to vanish overnight, but historians in another millenia may look back at the 'fundamentalist' movements of today and come to see them as the harbingers of the decline of monotheism.