{"id":1820,"date":"2010-03-03T08:11:12","date_gmt":"2010-03-03T15:11:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.harmonicminer.com\/wordpress\/?p=1820"},"modified":"2010-03-11T21:56:19","modified_gmt":"2010-03-12T04:56:19","slug":"the-left-at-christian-universities-part-18-fear-of-fundamentalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.harmonicminer.com\/wordpress\/2010\/03\/03\/the-left-at-christian-universities-part-18-fear-of-fundamentalism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Left at Christian Universities, part 18: Fear of Fundamentalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

The previous post in this series is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s really funny, almost.\u00a0 And sad.<\/p>\n

There is a too-large group of faculty at Christian universities who are more afraid of “fundamentalism” than they are of agnosticism, outright atheism and its secularist implications, or, most dangerous of all, simple Christian Leftism, which acts almost exactly like agnosticism or progressive secularism, and supports approximately the same social and political policies, but simply quotes scripture while doing it.<\/p>\n

To those suffering from fear of it, “fundamentalism” equates to willful ignorance, stubborn resistance to fact, anti-intellectualism, blind faith, and probably barely suppressed violence in the defense of rigidly held values.\u00a0 Most frightening of all, some “fundamentalists” appear to think that some things are actually true.<\/p>\n

To the Left, of course, and the Christian Left is little different, nothing is really true.\u00a0 Certainly nothing that can be stated in human language, anyway.\u00a0 Everything is up for endless re-interpretation.\u00a0 Not to mention re-interpretation of the re-interpretations.\u00a0 There is always a way to tease a new meaning out of something whose meaning has been understood for centuries, or even millennia, and then simply replace the old meaning with the new, while claiming to be “faithful to the text.”\u00a0 So Leftist Christian academics are busy finding support for diversity, multi-culturalism and affirmative action in the Old Testament, socialism and “anti-nationalism” in Luke, pacifism in the Sermon on the Mount, and abortion-on-demand and same-sex marriage in (apparently) “emanations of the penumbra” of the New Testament.\u00a0 None of these things (with the possible exception of some strains of pacifism) were discovered in the Scripture by the previous 19 centuries of exegesis.<\/p>\n

Why do these new meanings point in the direction favored by the secular-progressive left, in terms of social and political implications?\u00a0\u00a0 I think a case can be made that outcomes were chosen, and that interpretive methods were selected to support those outcomes.<\/p>\n

So, to me, the real question is not why does the Christian Left tend to favor textual deconstruction and relativistic interpretations, thus aping the secular Left.\u00a0 The real question, to me:\u00a0 Why is the Christian academic Left\u00a0 so enthusiastic about those outcomes listed above, so much that it is willing to distort its traditional hermeneutics into intellectual pretzels in order to prefigure the desired outcomes?<\/p>\n

There are many possible answers.\u00a0 I may suggest a few of them in a subsequent post.\u00a0 But for now, I simply observe that the word “fundamentalism” is sometimes hurled as an epithet on some Christian campuses, in response to the suggestion that maybe the Bible simply means what it says (or at least that should be our first assumption until evidence and context prove otherwise).\u00a0 Just as the new McCarthyism in politics starts by calling someone else a McCarthyite, the new “fundamentalists” these days are the Christian Left, for whom socialism, sustainability, diversity, climate change and same-sex marriage are the badges of “five point progressivism.”\u00a0 And from their point of view, anything and anyone who challenges this new orthodoxy or its presumed intellectual underpinnings is dangerous, and probably a “fundamentalist.”<\/p>\n

From where I sit, what the Left calls “fundamentalism,” these days, is simply historic, traditional Christianity.\u00a0 Maybe “fundamentalists” should co-opt the word and make it into a badge of honor.\u00a0 I’ll bet it would look good on a t-shirt.<\/p>\n

But on too many Christian campuses today, “fundamentalist” is the new F-word.\u00a0 It is used to stop conversation, and to intimidate voices that dissent from the emerging leftist orthodoxy.<\/p>\n

And that’s fundamentally wrong.<\/p>\n

The next post in this series is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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