« October surprise | Main | Charlie Sheen Screws Himself »
April 22, 2006
Evil Naiveté
In an editorial entitled "The Most Evil People in the World,” Doug Soderstrom gives what many non-Christian progressives (and I dare say even some Christian ones) might see as a rational view of fundamentalist Christians today. I urge you all to read it because it is frightening – both because of the truth in it and because of the dangerous misperceptions in it.
Soderstrom provides a laundry list of evils that fundamentalist Christians have tolerated and even embraced. But probably the truest statement in the piece is this:
The riddle of why such folks, who look upon themselves as being so very good while having behaved so terribly bad, can be understood by realizing that fundamentalists suffer from an axiomatic inability to face who they have, in fact, become. In having followed the dictum to be “in” the world, but certainly not “of” the world, they began to set themselves apart, to disengage from the rest of the world, effectively creating an inner sanctum, a world of their own, an imprisoned partition separating them from the rest of humanity. And, of course, all of such in order to protect themselves from being contaminated by an outer world of sin.
Here is where I believe Soderstrom doesn't seem to get the point of his own observations. While the evil deeds he cites have occurred and fundamentalist Christians have supported the leaders who perpetrated them, trusting that the evil is actually God's will, I truly do not believe that the general population of fundamentalist Christians has ever really grasped the truth. They have been taught since childhood to believe what they are told, unquestioningly, and to disregard their own observations. They are so separated from the world and so brainwashed that many of them are incurably naïve, disassociated from reality, and trusting. If you laid the facts out before them, they would believe you were an agent of Satan using clever deceptions to try to undermine their faith. I swear to God the fundamentalist Christians I know are not evil people.
This site, written by fundamentalist Christians who are not naïve, offers the following response to Soderstrom's article:
[We have] long warned that President Bush could conceivably set Fundamentalist Christians up to be persecuted by a future administration. You see, since Mr. Bush has claimed to be a Fundamentalist Christian, since too many Evangelical pastors have erroneously led their flock to believe Mr. Bush is a fine Christian, and since many in the Mass Media have repeatedly claimed that Bush's aggressive foreign policy is the result of his understanding of Biblical prophecy, if the President is brought down by a combination of scandals, he could so discredit real Christianity that we could be persecuted by Mr. Bush's successor.…
[W]e have been well aware over the years that people in foreign lands do equate Bush's policies with Christian Fundamentalists. When President Bush is accused of genocide in the spreading of Depleted Uranium throughout the Middle East, Christian Fundamentalists stand in the dock of public opinion with him! When the President is accused of extensively torturing prisoners since 9/11, Christian Fundamentalists stand in the dock with him. In fact, in every scandalous issue facing President Bush right now, Christian Fundamentalists are smeared with the same broad brush.
And, the fact that we do hold a high standard of life and morality makes the matter worse, because we are branded as hypocrites of the highest degree!
The evil these people are tolerating, and the support they give to those engaging in it, is unquestionably dangerous. But so is the fostering of outright hatred that could very easily turn into open persecution. The reason this frightens me so much is that I don't see a way out. You cannot change the fundamentalist mind, and increasingly these people are pulling their children out of public schools so as to avoid "evil indoctrination," thereby removing any opportunity to break through to the next generation with the truth. The best we can do is to focus our attention on religious leaders who seek to enforce fundamentalism via government policy.
Never has it been more important to retain a strong wall between church and state. It is the only thing standing in the way of an enormous backlash that could result in outright persecution of fundamentalist Christians.
Posted by Becky at April 22, 2006 04:54 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.preemptivekarma.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1210
