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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

fundamentalism & Hegel revised « Previous | |Next »
January 11, 2005

An interesting article by Walter Davis. It is a description of the characteristics of Christian fundamentalism analysized as a shape or form of consciousness along the lines of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. This description is done from the perspective of pyschoanalysis rather than philosophy, and it takes us away from viewing fundamentalist evangelicals as backward, ignorant, uneducated, socially marginal, ultraconservative and fanatical.

Davis's account relies heavily on, and revises, Charles Strozier's Apocalypse, a patient study of Christian fundamentalism in New York City. This study was based on extensive interviews over a five year period with members of apocalyptic communities. Strozier says that the four basic beliefs as fundamental to Christian fundamentalism are:

"(1)... biblical literalism, the belief that every word of the Bible is to be taken literally as the word of God; (2) conversion or the experience of being reborn in Christ; (3) evangelicalism or the duty of the saved to spread the gospel; and (4) Apocalypticism or Endism, the belief that The Book of Revelations describes the events that must come to pass for God's plan to be fulfilled. Revelations thus becomes an object of longing as well as the key to understanding contemporary history, to reading the news of the day and keeping a handle on an otherwise overwhelming world."

Strozier adds that each of these categories must be understood not doctrinally but psychologically. A brief review of Strozier's work can be found here.

From a Hegelian perspective fundamentalism is a historical form of consciousness, with a deep ambivalence towards enlightenment science and secular humanism. It is becoming a central part of our culture as it informs, and justifies, the Bush administration’s foreign policy and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. This is seen as a struggle against a violent Islam founded by the "terrorist" Muhammad. Israel is seen as being under attack by the forces of the Antichrist.The Bush admininistration's foreign policy is a messianic militarism constructed around the civilisation/barbarity dichotomy.

Fundamentalism casts a shadow of endism and violent transformation across liberal modernity. This shadow takes the form of a righteous struggle (a cultural war) against evil identified as homosexuals, abortion, the entertainment industry and the imperiled state of a nation bereft of moral values. They see themselves as embattled guardians of right conduct opposing the moral anarchy everywhere around them. As a return of the historically repressed, this once marginalized pre-modern tradition is a pre-modern critique of liberal modernity. It sees the failure of liberal modernity as a nihilistic one: liberal modernity is meaningless, morally bankrupt and an ethical void or blackhole.

Reading fundamentalism this way is a redescription of Strozier, who understands fundamentalism as a world view and self-concept of the individual fundamentalists. Strozier says that the inner core of this form of consciousness is structured around (1) the fundamentalists insecurity, fear, rage, and even violence are assuaged, which is re-directed by their expectations of and hopes in Jesus' return; and (2) the world is hopeless and "culture is rotten" in the sense that "the present is degraded and full of evil. God is furious and is about to end it all." Hence the dynamic of this form of consciousness is a development to endism as transformation can only be accomplished violently. This gives us a form spiritual warfare” to cleanse society of the sinister influence of secular (liberal) humanism.

What the Davis account offers is less an emphasis on Hegel's dialectical movement within the form of consciousness, in which the contradictions leads to a change to a new form consciousness; and more a psychoanalytic emphasis on the dynamics of the fundamentalist subject divided against itself.

Davis says that our concern should not be with fundamentalism as a pathetic phenomena, a halfway house for drug addicts and a panacea for those who find in it the infantalization they seek. Rather we should view it in terms of those who have fashioned in it as a strong valuation. This is a reference to Nietzsche, and Davis describes a strong valuation as an attempt to take up the fundamental problems of the psyche, and then fashioning a will to power out of one's resentment by developing a faith that will make one strong and righteous in that resentment.

Davis takes each core beliefs of fundamentalism in turn. Literalism is:

...the law that assures deliverance from all confusion. There is a single text, the Holy Bible. It contains clear, simple direct messages-proclamations-that establish the Truth once and for all. All of life's questions and contingencies are resolved by statements that are beyond change and interpretation....Every word of it must be the unalterable and unchanging word of God, which of course can contain no contradictions."

Literalism produces binary opposition where all conflicts and confusions is resolved into a sharp, simple, and comprehensive opposition between Good and Evil. This is what gives fundamentalism its moral certitude and certainity that the whole world is either with us or against us and nothing anyone says can have any other meaning.

Davis says that the second core belief, conversion, is best approached through narrative:

"A subject finds itself lost in a world of sin, prey to all the evils that have taken control of one's life. A despair seizes the soul. One is powerless to deal with one's problems or heal oneself because there is nothing within the self that one can draw on to make that project possible. The inner world is a foul and pestilent congregation of sin and sinfulness. And there's no way out. One has hit rock bottom and...teeters on the brink of suicide. And then in darkest night one lets Him into one's life. And all is transformed. Changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. Before one was a sinner doing the bidding of Satan. Now one is saved and does the work of the Lord. The old self is extinguished. Utterly. One has achieved a new identity, a oneness with Christ that persists as long as one follows one condition: one must let him take over one's life. Totally. All decisions are now in Jesus' hands. He tells one what to do and one's fealty to his plan must be absolute."

Davis says that this gives rise to a psychological splitting between the bad old self and the good new self. This primitive mechanism of defense employed by a psyche terrified of its inner world is raised to the status of a theological pathos.

Evangelicalism refers to the activity whereby the split in the psyche that conversion creates is projected onto the world. Davis says:

"The only way to prevent a return of the projections is through their continued projection. By locating them outside oneself and waging an "attack" on that externalization one is delivered from the fear of what can no longer be within. Everything bad is now outside oneself and one must do everything to keep it there. ...One is well tuned then. The manic drive has been unlocked and sweeps to a revenge upon anything that can be even remotely associated with one's former self; for one has entered a dream state and readies desire for wrathful discharge upon a world drenched in sin. Evangelicalism offers the psyche a chance to be cleansed again of everything that may still fester deep within somewhere, longing to break out."
Davis says that conversionism fulfills perhaps the deepest psychological necessity. Without this activity the fundamentalist psyche would implode.

The psychological operation in fundamentalism involves a cleansing of oneself by projecting one's disowned desires unto the world. The resulting split must then be maintained rigorously with nothing allowed to fall outside its scope. The psyche must be voided of everything save the serenities of the saved. For that to happen, however, the world must become the object of an unstinting attack on all that one has externalized there. This act must be endless lest the projections return.

The fourth belief of fundamentalism is endism or 'apocalyptic belief in an approaching confrontation, cataclysmic event, or transformation of epochal proportion, about which a select few have forewarning so they can make appropriate preparations. In Christianity, the Apocalypse refers to a gigantic global battle with Satanic forces that signals the end of time. The apocalyptic tradition also exists in Judaism and Islam. Davis says:

"The end. And a proper end-one that will give sublime expression to the desire that has fed the whole thing. Death. The longing for death transformed into a sublime celebration of death. Life in its complexity demands too much of us. That in a nutshell is the fundamentalist message. Only death can deliver one from the threat life poses. Only when life is done is one safe from a return of the projections and an eruption of the repressed."

He then give us a psychoanalytic account of the hatred and the death-drive associated with'apocalypse:
"In the depths of its psyche fundamentalism is ruled by catastrophic anxiety, a self tottering on the brink of a dissolution in which it will fragment imprisoned in a world that will impose all of its terrors and evils upon it. We will fail to understand fundamentalism as long as we resist seeing how close it is to a psychosis. Fundamentalist rage is the attempt of a subject to hold itself together in the only way it can: by waging war on all that terrifies it. The psyche commits itself to destructiveness to allay a destruction that already threatens it from within...one's salvation corresponds with the arrival of something else-the dawning of the cataclysmic aggressions that must be vented in order to bring destruction upon the earth and usher in the millenium."

What does this amaount to?

It gives us the inner logic of fundamentalism as a historical form of consciousness. Davis develops a psychoanalytic interpretation of Charles Strozier four core beliefs of fundamentalism. (1) Inerrancy as the need to reduce all complexities to the literal in order to confine the mind to its simplest operations; (2) Conversion or the use of the primitive psychological defense known as splitting to establish an absolute separation of the saved psyche from the damned; (3)Evangelicalism or manic activity as the way to sustain and project that split; (4) Apocalypticism or thanatos incarnate as the desire for an event that will satisfy the hatred and the death-drive that has come to define the fundamentalist psyche.

What it does not give us is the overcoming of this historical form of consciousness as a way of resolving its contradictions. And that does happen because not all Christians are fundamentalists.

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| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:19 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)
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Incredibly interesting. I really enjoyed reading this piece.