christian-fundamentalism

"In the 1976 election, the Republican candidate, President Gerald Ford, was the relatively pro-choice candidate; the Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter, was an evangelical Protestant who believed that abortion was immoral. The countermobilizations that Roe helped energize changed all of this. The Christian evangelical movement, which had largely stayed out of politics in the decades before the 1960s, saw abortion as a threat to biblical values and began to organize against Roe. Members of the Republican Party’s New Right, such as Phyllis Schlafly, who opposed the ERA, saw an obvious connection between their goals and those of Christian evangelicals. By the end of the 1970s, the two groups had formed an alliance that would dominate the Republican Party and revolutionize American politics. Ronald Reagan welcomed evangelical and fundamentalist Christian voters into the Republican Party and actively courted pro-life leaders. In the 1980 election, many evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians moved squarely into the republican camp and became an important part of the party’s base of support."

"There is a remarkable trend toward fundamentalism in all religions — including the different denominations of Christianity as well as Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam. Increasingly, true believers are inclined to begin a process of deciding: "Since I am aligned with God, I am superior and my beliefs should prevail, and anyone who disagrees with me is inherently wrong," and the next step is "inherently inferior." The ultimate step is "subhuman," and then their lives are not significant. That tendency has created, throughout the world, intense religious conflicts. Those Christians who resist the inclination toward fundamentalism and who truly follow the nature, actions, and words of Jesus Christ should encompass people who are different from us with our care, generosity, forgiveness, compassion, and unselfish love. It is not easy to do this. It is a natural human inclination to encapsulate ourselves in a superior fashion with people who are just like us — and to assume that we are fulfilling the mandate of our lives if we just confine our love to our own family or to people who are similar and compatible. Breaking through this barrier and reaching out to others is what personifies a Christian and what emulates the perfect example that Christ set for us."

"What the world witnessed, during the late 1970s, throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, was a widespread retreat from the churches and established religious bodies which had sought to rationalize their beliefs and come to terms with societies which in general were non-religious; and simultaneously, the growth of fundamentalism, which bypassed rationalism, stressed the overwhelming importance of faith and miraculous revelation and rejected the idea of compromise with institutions based on non-belief. The outstanding symbol of 'rationalizing' religion was the World Council of Churches, which throughout the 1980s had stressed ecumenicalism, minimalist beliefs and the need to reach agreement with Marxism and other anti-religious creeds. It lost support throughout the decade, and came close to discrediting itself finally in February 1991 during its meeting in Canberra. i"

"Any hope that America would finally grow up vanished with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalism, with its born-again regression, its pink-and-gold concept of heaven, its literal-mindedness, its rambunctious good cheer... its anti-intellectualism... its puerile hymns... and its faith-healing... are made to order for King Kid America."

"Look closely. Those are evangelical leaders and pastors — people who represent America's various streams of fundamentalist Christianity — venerating a president who, I think it's safe to say, reflects none of the qualities Jesus is believed to have embodied. It has become almost banal to recite Trump's ugly, vulgar, misogynist, racist mendacity, and yet here he is in an official White House photo, an image clearly meant to invoke the Last Supper, in the midst of an ecstatic laying on of hands. It is no exaggeration to say many evangelicals consider Trump an anointed figure; a clearly venal man somehow chosen by their God to rescue America from venality."