| Brown points us in the direction that many critics of literalism have followed - assertions that one believes in a literal bible must include an element of interpretation. Biblical literalism is a relatively modern invention - our ancestors lived in a world that one might think of as magical. A magical world is a symbolic world - the idea that knowing something true name gives you power over it, magic is symbolism; it invokes essences to control things, it suggests that a token of a thing is the thing itself. The shaman's world is an uncertain place - surfaces are fluid, constantly shifting and changing; reality itself seems mutable.
Fundamentalist protestantism lives within the shaman's world of magic. Watch and listen as fundamentalists invoke the name of Jesus Christ as totem, as magic words to ward off evil and danger. Jesus the Christ becomes an idol behind which to hide and to whom offerings must be made. The shaman, whether the lay person speaking in tongues or the preacher unveiling the mystery of the bible's truth is the shaman, who channels the knowledge of the dead, who is inhabited by the spirit of the dead. Certainty is achieved by asserting the single meaning of The Word; the argument that The Word does not change on the page, therefore its meaning cannot change it has always meants what it has always meant and it cannot ever mean anything other than what it has always meant.
The Enlightenment introduced - more accurately reintroduced - an idea to the western world: an evidence based understanding of the world. Science explicitly tells us we can reject the wisdom of our ancestors as we acquire new information. Therein lies the conflict. As Brown wrote, the shaman's world is one of "magical identification with ancestors" but the world of the Enlightenment asks us to make common cause with the present, to know that the future may reject what we accept as our descendents acquire new information.
And:
Oldness of letter, and newness of spirit. Historical literalism takes the periodization out of history; in Protestantism, the loss of the sense of the difference between Old Testament and New. Old and New Testament are made consistent, forced into conformity, to reveal the same literal truth. And the Puritans in New England can embark on a literal reproduction of Israel in the wilderness. Bondage to the letter is bondage to the past. Roger Williams fight for symbolic understanding his his fight for freedom.
Just as religious fundamentalism imagines we cannot be more wise than our ancestors, that our goal is to uncover the true and orignal meaning of The Word that is the Bible, so our politicial fundamentalists imagine that we cannot be more wise than the men who wrote the constitution. In asserting that one can discern the "original" meaning of the Constitution, these fundamentalists are telling us we cannot possibly know more or better than our ancestors. They have attempted to place us in bondage to the word on the page, to limit understanding to the literal and to reject the symbolic understanding which in legal terms is the constitution as a living document.
Religious fundamentalism embodies itself in assertions of interpretive fidelity to the primal meaning of the The Bible. To make such an assertion, religious fundamentalists have created a series of myths of "perfect" translation - in which translators work separately but choose the exact same words, situations in which the dead Holy Ghost possesses and animates scholars and translates and uses them to reach the predetermined conclusion. Fundamentalist faith demands of its believers that they reject the notion of change in belief and society. We are to be held in bondage to the ancestors.
Constitutional fundamentalism embodies itself in assertions of interpretive fidelity to the primal meaning of the Constitution. Amendments are seen not as expanding or altering the underlying document but as clarifying it to move it closer to the primal meaning. Consider for instance proposed amendments to prohibit same sex marriage - defended in terms of "The Fouding Fathers would never have accepted same sex marriage." Amendments are a process by which the underlying document is further purified to emphasize rather than alter its original primal meaning.
Protestant literalism: the crux is the reduction of meaning to a single meaning - univocation. Luther's word is Eindeutigkeit: the "single, simple, solid and stable meaning" of scripture.
When constitutional fundamentalists object to the concept of privacy as a legal right they object not on the grounds that they disbelieve in privacy, but on the grounds that it is not found in the words of the document. Brown's univocation - a single meaning without other meanings - is the core of American political fundamentalism as it approaches the Constitution.
Washington Monthly's Paul Glastris wrote an illuminating article about militias in 1995 which was described as "Our Roving Reporter goes in search of the militia movement's amateur soldiers and finds something even scarier-amateur lawyers." From that article:
What all "patriots" do seem to share, beyond the well-publicized fear that the federal government is stealing their rights, is a passionate devotion to the precise language of the nation's founding documents. Imagine Robert Bork and Nat Hentoff dropping acid in the woods and you begin to get the picture.
Better yet, imagine a fundamentalist revival meeting where the Bible is replaced by The Federalist Papers. As I chased the Nichols story around the prairie-flat eastern Michigan farm country on the wind-swept shores of Lake Huron, time and again friends and neighbors of James Nichols would bring up the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or The Federalist Papers, chide me for not having studied them, and quote from them as if from scripture. The religious parallels were unmistakable, even down to the millenarian belief, almost universally shared, that Washington's attack on individual liberty is a prelude to the imposition of a "New World Order": a totalitarian, one-world government controlled by the United Nations.
Suspicious, even dismissive, of the interpretations of scholarly priests (i.e. judges), patriots prefer an extreme version of Martin Luther's "priesthood of all believers" in which each individual can clearly grasp the framers' intent by reading the sacred texts for themselves. But like Christian fundamentalists, these patriots are guided by an idiosyncratic political agenda. They tend to quote selectively and read literally, "isolating the part from the whole and pretending that there can be only one reading," notes University of Chicago theologian Martin Marty. They are Constitutional fundamentalists.
Today's tea-baggers are the descendents - probably literally in many cases but also politically - of the militias of 20 years ago. I suspect we'd find many people who were attracted to and supported the militia movement are tea-baggers today. The common thread is an earnest desire for certainty.
Fundamentalism is a fascinating phenomenon. Religious fundamentalism offered biblical literalism as a response to science. It's not accidental that modern religious fundamentalism rejects much of the traditionally mystical - today's religious fundamentalists may reject meditation and chant and even the mystical ecstasy that has marked Christian devotees practices for centuries. (The line between evangelicals and fundamentalists is blurred; even blurrier is the line between pentecostals who do embrace some mystical practics such as speaking in tongues or snake handling and fundamentalists; pentecostalism embraces very specific types of mysticism which are grounded in literal readings of scripture.) Fundamentalism in essence argues that the Bible and its "literal" meaning can and should stand in place of science. This dynamic fuels creationism and its bastard step-child intelligent design, it fuels the belief that prayer is as powerful as medicine; at its most extreme one finds believers who refuse modern medicine, who embrace the notion that the earth is 6000 years old.
Many of our political fundamentalists are also religious fundamentalists. The interbreeding and inbreeding of the two sets of ideas inspires - as for example - the production of extensive DVD series which purport to document the orthodox and fundamentalist Christianity of the Founding Fathers or which purport to document the ways in which the Bill of Rights actually mimics the Ten Commandments (just a note, it doesn't). Our political fundamentalists appeared in response to rapid changes in society; they offered as certainty an absolute meaning of the Constitution.
Shared by fundamentalists of all stripes if Brown's "bondage to the past." We are presumed to be less wise than our ancestors and therefore less trustworthy. We are bound to and limited by the past. I think it was Carl Sagan who argued that if you live in an era of minimal change then the wisdom of the past is sufficient and it is trustworthy; it is the collected wisdom of those who came before you, the hard-won knowledge about what plants are deadly, what animals dangerous and how to avoid them and if necessary how to kill them, it is the hard won wisdom about how to prepare food and how relationships work; it is a wisdom that embraces gender roles as fixed things in the world and which sees in the stranger a threat to the well being of the community. In a world with little change, the wisdom of the past is more than sufficient. We do not live in such a world.
In our rapidly changing world, the wisdom of the past is not only insufficient it misleads us, it often moves us in the wrong direction. We learn t0 our chagrin that the wisdom of past - hoarded and preserved unchanged and untainted by contemporary knowledge - cannot adequately answer the demands of today's world. Fundamentalists political and religious believe in a past that was better than our present and which must of necessity be resurrected to save the world. You cannot remake was history has undone and you cannot unmake that which has been created.
The shamans of our religious and political lives invoke the past as the solution to all our problems. Liberation will not come until we reject the literal and embrace the symbolic, the new, the changing. We have a choice between liberating or binding magics. We must choose wisely. |
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