Reagan’s Man of God Speaketh
I love my extended family. There are a few that I don't see terribly often, but familial affections remains. However, there are a fair number of them with whom I vehemently disagree on matters of politics and faith. They are fundamentalists in the literal sense of the term. Anti-gay, anti-choice, biblical literalists who can run circles around me with biblical references, despite the fact that I am the son of a systematic theologian. They have also adopted children from China and Ethiopia, are culturally astute, generous to a fault, and extremely hospitable. I wish they were not so genial so that I could just hate their politics in peace (not really).
Despite the whole of their existence (yes, all of it) being based in their faith, something that we think of as firmly on the touchy feely side of our lovely mind/body chasm, my relatives are the most committed cartesians that I know, and far from being on the side of bodies and souls, humanities and passions, they are hardened rationalists, seasoned in the culture wars of apologetics. Why is this? I argue it is down to two separate factors that are irresistible for fundamentalist christians: the quest for certainty and the (almost) fetishization of unshakable first principles.
I can't say I recommend watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPLjztJx324. It's a convocation at Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell, of “Moral Majority” fame. It's a pretty standard amalgam of evangelical doctrine/propaganda, emotional manipulation, and inspirational shtick. What is interesting, and the reason I highlight it, is because it showcases an enamoration with first principles within the first two minutes, when the speaker talks about (I’m paraphrasing) how Through all of scripture and all of life there are certain things bedrock ideas that you can rest your feet on. In essence, he’s confident that he has found the bottom of the deep water than our friend Renee was falling into. The majority of the time, the bottom that fundamentalist Christians settle on as their first principle, and where they begin the construction of their artifice of “certainty” is biblical inerrancy.
Admiral Ackbar goes unheeded (i.e. its a trap)
Lets dig into this a little bit. I would guess that most of you would not hold that unless the earth was created in a literal seven, 24 hour days, a little over 3000 years ago, all of Christianity is an invalid non sequitur. It is commonly accepted that the Bible is not a textbook, but a collection of ancient manuscripts written in a variety of genres that needs to be interpreted and exegeted (a fancy theological word for ‘closely read’) with appropriate literary care.
However, there is an entire apparatus trying day and night to give legitimation to the ideology of the radical christian right. Liberty University (which has 115,000 students) teaches young earth creationism. The Museam of the Bible the just opened in Washington DC is funded by radical evangelicals https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opinion/sunday/the-museum-of-the-bible-is-a-safe-space-for-christian-nationalists.html and was called “a safe space for chiristan nationalists”. Several billionaire donors to the Republican party are in this radical evangelical bent. Why? What do they have to gain by defending patently nonsensical positions to the death when it seems so unnecessary? Mainline Protestantism has no problem with this. Martin Luther explicitly said that not all biblical commands have the same weight or authority. So why do evangelicals bend over backwards to keep their first principle of biblical inerrancy afloat when most Christians gave up on that ghost a long time ago? Why did they drink the Cartesian kool aid? Clearly, there is something other than the literal truth of the bible at stake.
A Kanye Bar a Day Keeps the Polemical Rationalists Away
“No one man should have all that power” is what Bishop West taught us all in 2010. But he didn't say we shouldn't try. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L53gjP-TtGE. I believe that the the christian right has embraced descartes for so long because it has been an expedient path to power in the west for the last half millenia or so, even if the religious right has only been truly ascendant since the late 1970’s. Better late to the party than totally absent.
To understand this it’s important to understand two dynamics at play. Both are pretty easy to understand. One, Christianity as whole has been increasingly associated with American Power in the 21st century. “In God we trust” was added to money and every other national symbol congress could get its hands on during the Eisenhower Administration. This was not about some increased theological acumen in the White House, but another way to distinguish American power from the godless communists. This dynamic is evident in the constant ways that conservative evangelicals try to convince everyone that the founders were just like them, despite the fact that Jefferson (the inexplicable revolutionary darling of the right) was an unabashed deist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism who wrote a bible that denies the divinity of Jesus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible, which is heresy in any authentic Christian doctrine. The Christian right has appropriated Jefferson from the High Enlightenment. That takes some serious guts.
The second dynamic has to do with the utter humiliation visited upon the Christian Right after the Scopes Monkey Trial, after which they retreated from public political life, and only reemerged with Reaganism in the 80’s. If you were essentially execrated from public life for 50+ years by the analytical, rationalist forces of thinking things, would it not be tempting to try to use their own weapons and thinking things against them. Thus, we see the love affair with Descartes and rationality begin to take root.
Cardinal Conway speaks ex Domus Alba
I believe that the reason fundamentalist evangelicals are so cartesian despite a legion of better options (more consistent with both the bible and the teachings of the first century Palestinian Jew, Jesus of Nazareth) available to them revolves around a desire for political power after long exile in the particular context of late 20th century America. Incidentally, this isn't very Cartesian, as a desire for power is very different from a search for clear and distinct knowledge. As the republican party moves away from what Latour’s guest might call “reality” and towards the twilight zone of alternative facts, it will be interesting to say if the Jerry Falwell’s of the world continue to bend over backwards to accommodate this inversion of the rationalism they have clung to, or if they will decide that the “moral relativism” that they lambasted President Clinton for isnt so bad now that they have fully ascended to power in all three branches of government. I suspect the latter, but I don't think the contradiction has been there the whole time. After all, no matter the strength and clarity of our cartesian moment, the world is always messy enough to induce our thinking things into a hypocracy or two.
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