Fundamentally shocked

Wednesday night my Comparative Religious Ethics class met.

And Rush Limbaugh turns out to be right. The liberal intellectuals do, after all, bash their conservative brethren while boasting of being tolerant and interested in dialog. (Not defending ol' Rush, here, but the thought did cross my mind.)

My buddy in class (who comes from conservative Christianity, too) said, "I feel like a pinata." That's how it felt to listen to Catholics describe Christian fundamentalists. Their "insight" was about as sharp as the thick end of a baseball bat and just about as subtle.

Assertion: One of my favorite attempts at explaining fundamentalists (who all support Bush, of course) was that they must be used to following whatever their church leaders say. They don't think for themselves individually because they only follow leaders... unlike Catholics who are trained to obey their personal consciences in matters of faith and practice.

Uh yeah... their consciences and... the POPE... who I thought was The Church leader...

Rebuttal: What worth-his-salt conservative Protestant puts a church leader ahead of his own ideas of what is true or from God? Haven't met one yet. We leave a church when we don't agree... isn't that the usual accusation?

Assertion: Fundamentalists only read the Bible literally. Catholics read it on many levels (metaphorical, analogical, literal, historical, theological...)... Amazing. I didn't know that Catholics read the Bible. Many in this very program have admitted to me that they had never even cracked the covers of a Bible until grad school.

Rebuttal: I felt constrained to point out that fundamentalists do read the Bible on lots of levels and in fact, do read it, a lot. They just take it so seriously that they don't want to read it in ways that undermine their orthodox beliefs. So they don't. Kind of like Catholics, who read the Bible so that it supports Church teachings.

Someone else asked: "Can fundamentalists be spiritual people?" Whoa! I thought all that daily prayer, Bible study, fasting, devotion to moral living and character growth were spiritual disciplines. But rats, apparently they are not since fundamentalists are convinced of their salvation.

Assurance of salvation was proof that a fundie was not in fact spiritual (which just happens to be the Catholic view of salvation. A fundie would say that the Catholic is not spiritual if she can't point to the date, time and locale of her conversion).

No response necessary.

6 day creationism was seen as absurd and the fact that a fundamentalist wouldn't lie about hiding Jews in WWII seen as "unreasonable" (as not promoting the use of reason). One astute Catholic student pointed out that perhaps for the fundamentalist, he believed in God with much more faith than the Catholic, in trusting that God's will would be done without the believer having to compromise his values that God had commanded him to live.

It was rough.

I take issue with most of the fundamentalist tenets of faith. But what I will never forget is that my life, in conservative evangelical circles, was full of conviction, study, sincerity, commitment to ideals and morals, intellectual stimulation (yes, it was!) and daily spiritual disciplines that caused me to be a better person, yes, a more decent, honest, hard-working, kind and caring/interested person. I figure Catholicism works the same way for Catholics.

Today, since I can't bear what I see as the superstitious side of faith, I have left evangelicalism. But not because fundamentalists were dumb or not spiritual or mere followers of men.

We all need to listen a lot more attentively to each other and stop one-upping our particular brand of faith. It's just not Christian.