We’re not as right as we think we are
Loss of the ability to laugh at oneself is the first warning sign of fundamentalism. It’s a personal maxim that has served well. Not unrelated is a shtick that comes in handy now and again. Jab your finger in the air toward someone as if punctuating an argument, and declare confidently, “Oh yeah? Well, I’m not as smart as I think I am.”
Let’s back up.
Heather Cox Richardson in her “Letters from an American” installment for July 9 observes that on this date in 1868, Americans ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. It eradicated the infamous Dred Scott decision by a Supreme Court then controlled by states’ rights advocates and “southerners and Democrats … adamantly opposed to federal power.” The drafters meant to ensure that southern states who recently fought a war to preserve slavery could not reimpose it under color of law in their legislatures.
They did anyway for the next 100 years under Jim Crow until the post-World War II Supreme Court flexed the equal protection and due process clauses to dismantle it.
The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.
And so the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
Whose ideas are being forced on whom is clearly at issue today. Particularly among a humorless, religious right faction as sure of its own righteousness as it is of the depravity of any who disagree. It is another “unpopular minority” bent on taking over national government. Through insurrection, if necessary, as the world saw on January 6, 2021. Humility is not a virtue with this crowd.
It is not often I reference David French, formerly a staff writer for National Review and a southern evangelical. Once opposed to same-sex marriage, he is, however, not so rigid as not to change his mind. It seems French, too, is put off by the Christian right’s fundamentalist fervor and embrace of authoritarianism (New York Times):
When I was a younger lawyer, conservatives fought speech codes that often inhibited religious and conservative discourse on campus. Now, red state legislatures are writing their own speech codes, hoping to limit discussion of the ideas they disfavor. When I was starting my career, my conservative colleagues and I rolled our eyes at the right-wing book purges of old, when angry parents tried to yank “dangerous” books off school library shelves. Well, now the purges are back, as parents are squaring off in school districts across the nation, arguing over the words children should be allowed to read.
Years ago, I laughed at claims that Christian conservatives were dominionists in disguise, that we didn’t just want religious freedom, we wanted religious authority. Yet now, such claims are hardly laughable. Arguments for a “Christian nationalism” are increasingly prominent, with factions ranging from Catholic integralists to reformed Protestants to prophetic Pentecostals all seeking a new American social compact, one that explicitly puts Christians in charge.
The dominionist paranoia that enemies on the left are “coming after” their children and their families views censorship as protective, French writes. The threats come from without. They would be wise to attend to their own scripture in which Jesus says in the book of Mark, “There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.”
French references G.K. Chesterton’s acknowledgment that what’s wrong with the world might be him. “The doctrine of original sin rejects the idea that we are intrinsically good and are corrupted only by the outside world,” French writes. “Under this understanding of Scripture, we are all our own greatest enemy — Christians as fully as those who do not share our beliefs.” Awareness of our own flaws must “temper our confidence that we either can control or should control the public square.”
The framers constructed the Constitution around the idea that, as James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
One need not be a cultural anthropologist of American Christianity to be aware of molestation among fundamentalists and Catholic clergy, as well as within religions communities walled off against corrupting influences from the outside. Evil lurks inside the walls as well.
French concludes:
This recent legacy of scandal and abuse should be more than enough evidence of the need for existential humility in any Christian political theology. This is not moral relativism. We still possess core convictions. But existential humility acknowledges the limits of our own wisdom and virtue. Existential humility renders liberty a necessity, not merely to safeguard our own beliefs but also to safeguard our access to other ideas and arguments that might help expose our own mistakes and shortcomings.
Who is wrong? I am wrong. We are wrong. Until the church can give that answer, its political idealism will meet a tragic and destructive end. The attempt to control others will not preserve our virtue, and it risks inflicting our own failures on the nation we seek to save.
Fundamentalism of any flavor, left or right, is not about what one believes, but how. It is rigid, dogmatic, unforgiving, especially of nonconformity. It is humorless and cannot admit error.
Humility is underrated. None of us are angels. People’s drive to dominate others prevented the equal protection and due process clauses from having teeth for 100 years. The same old-time political religion still resists tolerance of others’ views as it does treating all persons as created equal, and with an equal right to share in governance. That expression from our public scripture never took root in many hearts.