“I’m Not Against Christians….”

“….just fundamentalists.” The word “fundamentalist” is increasingly becoming associated with right-wing bigots who want to build and enforce a theocracy within a country, whether Christians, or Muslims, or any other faith. Examining this phenomenon carefully, though, we can see the outlines of the dialectic process at work, in the rejection of one truth claim against the promotion of another.

At its essence, the argument goes something like this:

Fundamentalism is extreme.
Extremism in all its forms is bad.
Fundamentalism is bad.

Its easy to attack the first point, that all fundamentalism is extreme, but it takes a lot of explaining and convincing to attack this point. You must begin by trying to define fundamentalist Christianity—you could argue from the five points, or some other document, etc—and showing the difference between this and the fundamental form of other philosophies. Along the way, you’re going to get arguments like:”But that’s not what I mean, I mean fundamentalism!” The problem here is when you try to define a word a person has attached a fuzzy negative meaning to, you’re never going to win. They’re simply going to morph the meaning of the word from point to point, to frustrate your attempts at nailing down a meaning.

Instead of trying to untie this knot from the second point, that all extremism is bad. There are, in fact, two problems with this statement. The first is, there is an underlying assumption that the speaker is talking about one part of reality, and excluding the other parts of reality. No-one would argue its bad for people to become extremely good drivers. Nor would they want anything but a doctor at the extreme end of the knowledge and skills scales. What they are really saying is this: “It’s okay to be extreme in some things, like an extreme skateboarder, but it’s not okay to be extreme in the moral realm.” And my immediate question is:”Why?”

Understanding what the argument actually entails exposes the second point of attack: What is wrong with moral extremism? If you claim moral extremism is wrong, then what you are claiming is there is no such thing as absolute right, and absolute wrong. And this, I propose, is the bottom line in this argument: Fundamentalism is bad because it proposes absolute standards of right and wrong.

Our way suddenly becomes clear when we state it in this way. For isn’t the proposition: “It’s wrong to believe in absolute standards of right and wrong,” itself, an absolute standard of right and wrong? Once we’ve unpacked the meanings of the words, the argument itself becomes fuddled, self-refuting. Once we’ve unpacked the meanings of the words, we return to our old stomping grounds of claiming one standard of right and wrong is bad, while another is good, because we personally would prefer to live under one, rather than the other.

And this is a very dangerous place to be.