Religious Conservatism on the Upswing

Scot McKnight and friends had an interesting discussion yesterday about the rise of neo-fundamentalism:

http://www.jesuscreed.org/?p=1383

Russ Gunsalus showed me the most recent front cover of Christianity Today, which is about the resurgence of the more virulent forms of Calvinism.

The trend is more than just the usual fight against the "dying of the light," the age old sense that religious institutions are always going liberal. I have thoughts on this subject too (surprise).

"Tangent" on the Dying of the Light
On the one hand, it is apparently well documented that religious institutions of higher learning have a tendency to become less and less affiliated with their parent denominations and eventually to become secular. It can go the other way, at least for a time, as the witch trial at Louisville Southern Baptist in the 90s did.

So you regularly hear rhetoric of "carrying the torch" and "don't let the fire go out" and "we need a revival." You also often hear an anti-education or anti-intellectual edge in the pew, a "town-gown" divide, as it were. It's been especially prominent on News shows with witch hunts of liberals at colleges and universities around the nation. Scarborough Country on MSNBC had a number of programs last year about removing extreme liberals from tax paid funded American universities. One of the main speakers at the Truth Conference of the Wesleyan Church this summer had this witch hunt flavor.

To be sure, there are a lot of whackos out there at educational institutions. I am amazed at a good deal of it. Don't take anything I say here as support for some of the sloppy thinking that passes in the name of education out there.

But a very sobering question lurks in the "dying of the light" scenario. Underlying this "myth" is the presumption that the more a person studies, the more likely he or she is to go liberal. Is this true? If it is, then something like one of the following must surely be true 1) there's a Satanic conspiracy, 2) there's a human conspiracy, 3) education tempts people to a particular kind of temptation that tends to lead to temptation, or 4) the truth tends to the liberal.

If there's a human conspiracy, I don't know about it (and you'd think I would by now). Clearly the conservative ideological machine is alive and well and just if not more popular right now than any liberal machine. So at best we have #3, a human temptation associated with education. I think if there is a Satanic conspiracy, it also must boil down to #3.

On the other hand, individuals like Ben Witherington and Tom Wright are immensely popular--ravenously devoured by conservatives. So I don't buy that there is some universal temptation that pushes the educated go liberal. I personally believe I could really have gone places these last ten years if my sermons and teaching played more to reinforcing traditional values and ideas. I think I could easily be on a speaking circuit by now doing a bunch of revivals and writing popular books.

[By the way, I'm not suggesting that Witherington or Wright are faking it. I wholeheartedly believe they are sincere.]

To me the answer to this question that has always been the most likely answer, that has always been staring us in the face generation after generation is that in some way, the truth tends to work against the traditional. Notice how I worded it this time. I did not say that the truth is liberal. There are a thousand different "liberals," just as there are a thousand different "conservatives." The trend is what is common, not the specific content that is deconstructing.

Note, for example, Daniel Wallace's defense of his view of inerrancy. This man is no liberal to be sure, but he is being attacked by his particular set of traditionalists, simply because he has come to see that matters are more complicated than he might at first have thought:

https://delta.indwes.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=4200

And there's the real answer. Ideological systems tend to be human contructs that denconstruct on closer examination. Reality is too complex for any human system of positive understanding to capture or grasp it. Institutions of higher learning tend toward their respective "liberal" simply because the more you investigate a subject, the more previous human constructs of that subject deconstruct.

The secret is thus not in constructing a new liberal system which itself will only deconstruct. But what we need to expend our energies toward is operating with a sense of mystery as we investigate, to learn to view human truth as a collection of true metaphors and true "myths." We believe God knows everything, but accept that we are only getting little snippets of what God knows in a skewed form.

Return to "Main" Subject
I suspect that 9-11 is the key factor behind the most recent resurgence of fundamentalism. For most Americans, religion is part of a cultural package that cannot distinguish America and apple pie from church. The Iraq War has only furthered the polarization of world religions. Iran will do the same. Right now I'm predicting that a Republican will win in 2008 because of the impending crisis with Iran.

So liberal colleges and seminaries are in trouble. Conservative ones face a marketing boon. So Liberty Baptist will rock this decade!

Thoughts...