The Fundamentalist Psyche

I’ve dismissed the notion of a “fundamentalist psyche” before, but only in cases in which I believed its bearer was misusing the term to score some sort of political points for one side or the other in the culture wars by associating his opponents with Islamic radicals. The term really does have a valid application with regards to some forms of thinking and writing. This review by Jerry Coyne is itself a strange example of the fundamentalist mindset.

I don’t mean to say that his brand of scientistic rationalism is a mirror opposite of dispensationalism or ID. Far from it. Yet this review enters into a symbiotic relationship with fundamentalist thinking. In the first half of this relationship, ID proponents and anti-evolution religious types concede the materialist implications of 21st-century Darwinian science. Implications thus conceded, they are forced unleash their attacks in scientific terms—terms which the mass of true believers are ill-equipped to evaluate (and disinclined to do so anyway), and terms which guarantee an easy smackdown by Dawkins, Dutton, Harris, Hitchens, Coyne, or their seemingly innumberable imitators.

In exchange for this favor, Coyne and the others agree to concede that the only legitimate forms of theology or religiosity are fundamentalist forms:

[Some] theologians with a deistic bent seem to think that they speak for all the faithful. These were the critics who denounced Dawkins and his colleagues for not grappling with every subtle theological argument for the existence of God, for not steeping themselves in the complex history of theology. Dawkins in particular was attacked for writing The God Delusion as a “middlebrow” book. But that misses the point. He did indeed produce a middlebrow book, but precisely because he was discussing religion as it is lived and practiced by real people. The reason that many liberal theologians see religion and evolution as harmonious is that they espouse a theology not only alien but unrecognizable as religion to most Americans.

“Quite right”, said Damir the other day as he quoted the above passage to me. I replied, “What good is a middlebrow objection to a middlebrow answer? I want the highbrow answer and the highbrow objection.” But Coyne and Dawkins haved already dismissed the highbrow from the debate as somehow “inauthentic.” So much for Aristotle, Aquinas, Barth, Buber, Dyson, Einstein, Gödel, Moses Maimonides, Pascal, Polkinghorne, etc. These and other “liberal” (read “milquetoast”) thinkers or theologians aren’t representative of authentic religious beliefs.

This symbiosis doesn’t make for a particularly interesting conversation, but it does set up some easily defensible positions in which to entrench oneself.