Fundamentalism as Pop Psychology

Posted on May 19, 2005 in Morals & Ethics Social Justice

The Seventies made the Sixties look tame. That is when the practices of hippie culture went mainstream and the middle class faced the shock of events such as the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. They jumped into hot tubs, groped each other in orgies, shivered in encounter groups, joined other in consciousness raising sessions, went seeking enlightenment at Esalen, attended EST seminars, and did a lot of drugs. It was the Decade of Pop Psychology and Fundamentalism came out of this culture.

Many of these practices placed stress rather than removed it from individuals. Many got a clue and stopped using the drugs and alcohol, stopped looking for instant answers to their anxieties, went on lithium, made lasting relationships. Liberal Christianity and Humanism provided adequate support for this transition so it wasn’t because of these alone that Fundamentalism arose. In fact, Fundamentalism mimicked many of the screwy practices of the seventies by offering the same thing: open-the-box-and-pour-it-out relief.

In the mid-seventies, a bumper sticker appeared on cars all across the nation. TIME pointed it out. It became faddish for members of a particular set to sport. This set felt depressed by the triumph of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. They could not turn to Science to validate their beliefs in the racial superiority of whites: it was common knowledge that since the 1920s, the intellectual differences were small if they existed at all. Sociologists of the time studied class conditions. Affirmative Action attempted to give people who had been tested out a chance at receiving a college education. It just wasn’t cool to be racist anymore and you had to share your bathroom with Negroes. As for the war, everyone said that we’d lost it. Everyone who counted. In the mind of the average white, there just wasn’t saying that we left a bad situation that we shouldn’t have entered in the first place. We lost the war. We lost the war. We had failed.

Then came the bumper sticker. I FOUND IT. The “it” was Jesus Christ. The slogan insinuated that America was declining as a nation. Which made great sense to those who’d lost the privileges of race and class. Like the groupies who flocked after salesman Werner Ehrhard, they wanted to feel good about themselves in the easy knowledge that they were just better than everyone else.

It was easy: just said that you had found Christ. All your sins — the boozing, the promiscuity, the drug abuse — sloughed off. Having been saved, you attained a kind of predestination: it didn’t matter that you sinned anymore. It wasn’t like the Catholics or the Liberal Christians or the Humanists who saw life as a long hard road where one could continue to fall and one often found that one was not saved enough. You just loved Jesus and that was enough.

Like drugs and alcohol, you went for the fast fix. You said you loved Jesus. You avoided the harder, longer roads of therapy, education, or tradtional penitence.

And in that, the extreme Right wing found its ideal vehicle for masking its secular contempt for genuine Christian morality. Televangelists bearing the big bucks bought their way into the Republican Party. The Republicans happily took the money, put on the mantle of sanctity, and declared themselves fearless. Republican politicians didn’t have to go to church or practice any good deeds. By declaring that they loved Jesus, they were saved. And many voted for them in the belief that to do so was to bring them to God.

Yes, they had “found it” all right. A regular lode of gold. What had been the Party of Lincoln sold out to racial prejudice. The party which opposed the urban machines rigged the ballot boxes and stole the 2000 election and maybe the 2004 election also. All because of an easy formula that discharged the utterer of any obligation to live a moral life when it came to materialism or war. And when men and women of principle would not make the declaration because they felt it to be a sham, the simonists and the machine politicians called them unChristian and unAmerican.

“Jesus Loves You” had become the ultimate weapon for those who undermined His word and deeds. They had made him American, given him a bank account and a flaming sword to slice down the liberals and progressives who wanted a world more closely modeled on New Testament values. Saying that you had accepted Jesus into your life was a pleasure pill. No sugar, no side effects except hatred and blindness to one’s own sinfulness.

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Jill had her own thoughts on the matter.