The Danger from Christian Fundamentalists, part one

The Devil You Know: The Surprising Link between Conservative Christianity and Crime was published in 2016 by Prometheus Books, which is also the publisher of two of my books. The author, Elicka Peterson Sparks, is a criminologist.

Her main point, as I interpret it, is that our American society is more violent and crime-ridden as a result of the influence of Christian fundamentalism than it would be under the influence of a more generalized humanitarian philosophy, whether founded in religion or not. She said that this significant negative influence of fundamentalism on society was occurring despite eight years of a progressive presidential administration. She could not have imagined that, with the election of Donald Trump, Christian fundamentalism would become the ruling force in America, which means that everything she said has become dangerously urgent.

I did not consider the link to be surprising. My own personal experiences with fundamentalism have long convinced me that Christian fundamentalists pick and choose the parts of the Bible they want to believe in order to oppress and destroy anyone who disagrees with them. I dared to teach about the science of evolution, from a Christian viewpoint, at a conservative church in 1982, only to have the fundamentalist members rise up and demand that I be silenced. They simply lied about what I said. The first two colleges at which I worked as a young faculty member were fundamentalist colleges—The King’s College in New York and Huntington College in Indiana—and in both places, quite literally, the Republican Party was God’s Presence on the Earth and God’s Work consisted of supporting the Republican Party. I never had the slightest doubt that Christian fundamentalists were powerful and dangerous. Eventually, I left conservative Christianity, largely because it was overwhelmingly populated by these negative, untruthful people. Fundamentalism, which has become more powerful over recent decades, picks and chooses the violent parts of the Bible and ignores the more positive parts.

Fundamentalists love, love, love the passages that prescribe violence and punishment. Atheists hate, hate, hate them and dismiss all religion as evil. Most of us, in between these extremes, see that the Bible was written during ancient times when slaughter was considered normal foreign policy, and when trial by ordeal was considered normal jurisprudence; and that we should dismiss those passages as outdated. We choose to focus on the positive and loving passages. In the Old Testament, we prefer to focus on passages such as Beat Your Swords into Plowshares and ignore the violent ones. In the New Testament, we prefer to dismiss the blood and gore of Revelation and focus on the Sermon on the Mount.

That is, in fact, what I do today. I am free to pick and choose the passages of the Bible I like because I consider the Bible to be a historical accumulation of mutually-contradictory writings, rather than a coherent Word of God. But here is what shocked me. I had been picking and choosing which parts of the Bible to believe even back when I was a fundamentalist. A true Bible Christian must believe that, at least in the past, God wanted His People to kill everyone who disagreed with them, and to subject women to trials by ordeal. I wasted years of my life trying to fit my humanist views into a fundamentalism that rejected them. I am now a Christian agnostic; but it appears that I have been for decades, without realizing it. It was something of a shock for me to discover that I have never really been a Bible Christian.

Maybe a generalized Christian humanism, one that is based on God Is Love, would make a society better. But this generalized Christianity is not fundamentalist Christianity.

A large part of Sparks’s book consists of long lists of Bible verses—not just references, but quotations—that condone violence. They are conveniently and alphabetically organized. It is difficult to plow through the Bible verses that Sparks assembles in her pages. But I did it, because these verses are, in fact, part of the Bible that I once revered as the Word of God.