American Fundamentalisms

Some of the best thought provoking politicial articles in the blogosphere in my opinion are posted at TomDispatch. American Fundamentalisms is a topic not often covered in the American media. TD wades right in with this recent James Carroll interview.

TD frequently conducts interviews with those who have written books about controversial matters and who think outside of the mainstream media’s take on current events. This fascinating interview by Tomdispatch with James Carroll about the background and renewed growth under George W. Bush of American Fundamentalism is a must read for those who wish to better understand the forces still driving George Bush and the thinking of many Americans, especially those in the military.

An excerpt from the interview follows. To read the entire interview go to TomDispatch.

“TD: When it comes to the Bush administration, complete collapse or not, we know that this man, without the possibility of changing his mind, and his vice president, without the possibility of changing his mind, with whomever they can still control in their own government and military, are there until January 2009. What does it mean to have people in a fundamentalist mindset, but thoroughly embattled and on the downward slide? I wouldn’t like to write off the next year and a half. It’s a potential nightmare.

Carroll: It could indeed be. But this issue involves more than the temperament of George Bush. It involves the structure of the fundamentalist mind. One pillar is bipolarity — the understanding of reality as divided between good and evil; you’re on the side of good and they’re on the side of evil. However, they can begin by being Osama bin Laden’s band, which then becomes the Taliban, which becomes Afghanistan, which becomes all the Muslims who ever talked about the Great Satan, which becomes Iraq, and now maybe Iran, and even critics in the U.S. “They,” “they,” “they.” We see that progression in Bush. A second pillar is an absolute allergy to doubt. The fundamentalist mindset doesn’t survive once you admit doubt or self-criticism. When asked for an example of a mistake he had made, Bush surprised people two years ago by claiming he couldn’t think of one. The tragedy of Bush is, if you ask that question of him today, I’m sure he would answer the same way.

A World Religiously Aflame

Let’s just step back a minute, though. How different are the Democratic presidential candidates really? What I hear from them, too, is a world divided between the good and the bad. I also hear — this is the meaning of the new rhetoric about the failure of Iraq being the failure of Iraqis — that we Americans are not to criticize what we’ve done in any basic way. “I wouldn’t renounce my vote.” “The president lied to me, that’s why I voted the way I did.” No capacity for self-criticism, for doubt.

You know, the genius of the American system — why the Constitution is worth defending — is that our Constitution comes from Roger Williams, not John Winthrop and John Cotton. It assumes a world not divided between good and evil, but one where everybody participates in the whole mess.

What are checks and balances? The Constitution’s authors understood that even people motivated by good intentions are going to screw up. So everybody, every institution, needs to be checked. This system assumes not bipolarity but unipolarity, in the sense that we’re all capable of mistakes, that we all have to be constantly criticized. The Constitution is an ingenious structure for living in the real world.

TD: And yet, in recent years, the presidency and the Pentagon, in particular, as you’ve written in your history of the Pentagon, House of War, have seemingly grown beyond institutional checks and balances.

Carroll: The question today is whether the Constitution continues to exist as anything beyond a kind of totem, a vestige? Recent history certainly suggests that the Pentagon is now “unchecked.” And if we can end our present war by blaming the Iraqis, then the Pentagon will be immune from criticism and prepared for the next foray of American power. That’s why we must challenge this laying the blame on the Iraqi people, as if their “sectarianism” weighs more than our hubris. As of now, I fear, we’ll be getting out of this war with what brought us into it intact.

TD: People sometimes ask me about Iraq: “Well, what would you do?” It’s a question that drives me crazy. I always think: Well, why didn’t you ask me back when it mattered? Why didn’t you ask me when I could have said, “Don’t go in.” So I’m hesitant to ask you, but if you had the power to begin to organize people in some fashion, what first steps would you take to mend this world?

Carroll: Let me just say that we’ve been talking only America here, in part because I think people are attuned to the threat from what’s called “Islamic fundamentalism.” My own conviction is that a crucial twenty-first century problem is going to be Christian fundamentalism. Its global growth is an unnoticed story in the United States. Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia are now absolutely on fire with zealous belief in the saving power of Jesus, in the most intolerant of ways. A religious ideology that affirms the salvific power of violence is taking hold. It denigrates people who are not part of the saved community, permitting discrimination, and ultimately violence. Hundreds of millions of people are embracing this kind of Christianity.

So what am I doing? I’m a Christian. I’m raising this alarm from within the community. That’s why I believe, as a Roman Catholic, that my own tradition must be rescued from its current temptation to fundamentalism. There are a billion Catholics in the world. For all its problems, Roman Catholicism has reckoned with the Enlightenment, has accepted the scientific worldview, has no argument with evolution, has learned to read the Bible in metaphoric ways, as opposed to literal ones. Today we have a fundamentalist Pope, but he rules from the margin. It’s hugely important that the Catholic tradition not go fundamentalist.

You ask me what I would do. I think, for one thing, that believing people, whether Jews, Muslims, or Christians, need to affirm the importance of pluralism, respect for the other, and modesty about religious claims. I could be a Jew sitting in Jerusalem and offer exactly the same argument about the Jewish zealots making claims on land in the name of God. So Jewish zealotry, Muslim zealotry, Christian zealotry, all three empowered lately, all three armed to the teeth. That’s what’s really terrifying — and, in the world of weapons of mass destruction, it’s not that hard to get armed to the teeth.”

To think in terms of “good against evil” with no room for shades of color when all sides are armed with nuclear weapons and when all sides think that it is God’s will to purge the world of evil by any means possible is a terrifying thought. If Christian fundamentalism, Jewish fundamentalism, and Islamic fundamentalism are not checked, and in the United States the “wall of separation” rebuilt between religion and government is not restored, we will be lucky to survive the 21st century.

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