Why the Fundamentalist Right is so Fundamentally Wrong

Christian fundamentalism began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries among British and Fundamentalism as a movement manifested in various denominations with various Fundamental Baptist and Independent Fundamental Churches of America). .. He applied the term to Catholics both on the right and on the left.
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I could write a bunch of stuff about those numbers being crazily inaccurate, but let me allow the Lord to respond: I will be a swift witness against One of the most humorous aspects of modern-day, far-right Christianity is its reverence of capitalism. That's because Christ could be considered almost "anti-capitalist. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. There is some version of the story of the rich man approaching Jesus that appears in every synoptic Gospel.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus tells the rich man, "go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Lazarus is a beggar who waits outside of a rich man's house and begs for scraps. When both Lazarus and the rich man die, Lazarus ends up in heaven, while the rich man ends up in hell.


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When the rich man begs for water, Abraham says, "Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. Why Fundamentalists Hate These Verses: Because the only thing fundamentalists dislike more than immigrants is poor people. Just this year, Tea Party Congressman Stephen Fincher explained why he thought the government should cut food stamps entirely, "The role of citizens, of Christians, of humanity is to take care of each other, but not for Washington to steal from those in the country and give to others in the country.

Five Things Christian Fundamentalists Just Don't Get | HuffPost

The entire Tea Party movement is based on the idea that a huge portion of Americans are "takers" who suck the lifeblood out of the economy. The Catholic Church actually has a long history of decrying the exploitation of the poor and supporting union movements See Rerum Novarm. Chesterton's writing on the rich often hits Occupy Wall Street levels "The rich man is bribed They therefore hold that success should be described in terms of morality; this is the so-called Protestant ethic that Weber praised.

But it is also, as Nietzsche noted, the "ethic of the hangman.


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The Environment The Verse: In Genesis, man is given stewardship of the Earth, God's creation. Man should exist in harmony with the earth, not work against it. By him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities -- all things were created through him and for him.

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And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Why Fundamentalists Hate The Verse: Jesus Christ once told his followers: No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

Increasingly, the religious right is trying to do exactly that, intertwining Evangelical fundamentalism with unfettered capitalism -- with disastrous results for the environment. Thus, American political life is increasingly dominated by Christians who reject the religious ethos, in favor of capitalist ethos. One Conservative Evangelical publication, World magazine, hypes the "We Get It" campaign , which seeks to discredit the threat of global warming.

It also claims the threat of climate change is "alarmism" and fears that efforts to clamp down on emissions will hurt the poor read: But this threatens any alliance with the white evangelical movement. That has become increasingly racist in the last 30 years. President Trump is forgiven all his lies and adulteries because he so clearly stands for white supremacy.

Why I Left an Evangelical Cult

But when he loses power, the fundamentalists will, too. Their literally patriarchal attitudes to women have already lost the younger generation. Conservatives used to warn that liberals who married the spirit of the age would be left as widows. It is a historic irony that this will be the fate of American conservative Christianity. It did not yet become associated with tenets such as Young Earth creationism. By the late s, theological conservatives rallying around the five fundamentals came to be known as "fundamentalists".

They reject the existence of commonalities with theologically related religious traditions, such as the grouping of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism into one Abrahamic family of religions. Scholars identify several politically active Hindu movements as part of the "Hindu fundamentalist family. Extremism within Islam goes back to the 7th century to the time of the Kharijites. From their essentially political position, they developed extreme doctrines that set them apart from both mainstream Sunni and Shia Muslims. The Kharijites were particularly noted for adopting a radical approach to Takfir , whereby they declared other Muslims to be unbelievers and therefore deemed them worthy of death.

The Shia and Sunni religious conflicts since the 7th century created an opening for radical ideologues, such as Ali Shariati —77 , to merge social revolution with Islamic fundamentalism, as exemplified by the Iranian Revolution in The Iran hostage crisis of —80 marked a major turning point in the use of the term "fundamentalism". The media, in an attempt to explain the ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution to a Western audience described it as a "fundamentalist version of Islam" by way of analogy to the Christian fundamentalist movement in the U. Thus was born the term Islamic fundamentalist , which became a common use of the term in following years.

Jewish fundamentalism has been used to characterize militant religious Zionism , and both Ashkenazi and Sephardic versions of Haredi Judaism. As defined by Goodrick-Clarke, Nordic racial paganism is synonymous with the Odinist movement including some who identify as Wotansvolk. He describes it as a "spiritual rediscovery of the Aryan ancestral gods On the basis of research by Mattias Gardell , [34] Goodrick-Clarke traces the original conception of the Odinist religion by Alexander Rud Mills in the s, and its modern revival by Else Christensen and her Odinist Fellowship from onwards.

Christensen's politics were left-wing, deriving from anarcho-syndicalism , but she believed that leftist ideas had a formative influence on both Italian Fascism and German National-Socialism, whose totalitarian perversions were a betrayal of these movements' socialist roots. Elements of a leftist and libertarian racial-socialism could therefore be reclaimed from the fascism in which they had become encrusted. Mills' almost-forgotten writings inspired her with a programme for re-connecting with the gods and goddesses of the old Norse and Germanic pantheons, which she identified with the archetypes in Carl Jung 's concept of the racial collective unconscious.

According to Christensen, therefore, Odinism is organically related to race in that "its principles are encoded in our genes". In , McNallen's Asatru Free Assembly collapsed from prolonged internal tensions arising from his repudiation of Nazi sympathizers within the organization. A group of these, including Wyatt Kaldenberg , then joined the Odinist Fellowship as its Los Angeles chapter and formed an association with Tom Metzger , which led to a further rebuff since "Else Christensen thought Metzger too racist, and members of the Arizona Kindred also wanted the Fellowship to be pro-white but not hostile to colored races and Jews".

Doctrinal and institutional development

In the United States, some white supremacist groups and terrorists—including several with neo-fascist or neo-Nazi leanings—have built their ideologies around pagan religious imagery, including Odinism or Wotanism. One such group is the White Order of Thule. The question of the relationship between Germanic neopaganism and the neo-Nazi movement is controversial among German neopagans, with opinions ranging across a wide spectrum. Active conflation of neo-fascist or far right ideology with paganism is present in the Artgemeinschaft and Deutsche Heidnische Front.

The Guardian view on US religion: the Christian right is breaking up

In the United States , Michael J. Mattias Gardell claims that while older US racist groups are Christian and patriotic Christian Identity , there is a younger generation of white supremacists who have rejected both Christianity and mainstream right-wing movements. For instance, the Archbishop of Wales has criticized "atheistic fundamentalism" broadly [52] [53] [54] and said "Any kind of fundamentalism, be it Biblical, atheistic or Islamic, is dangerous".

In The New Inquisition , Robert Anton Wilson lampoons the members of skeptical organizations such as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal as fundamentalist materialists, alleging that they dogmatically dismiss any evidence that conflicts with materialism as hallucination or fraud.

In France, the imposition of restrictions on the wearing of headscarves in state-run schools has been labeled "secular fundamentalism". The term "fundamentalism" is sometimes applied to signify a counter-cultural fidelity to a principle or set of principles, as in the pejorative term " market fundamentalism ", used to imply exaggerated religious-like faith in the ability of unfettered laissez-faire or free market economic views or policies to solve economic and social problems.

According to economist John Quiggin , the standard features of "economic fundamentalist rhetoric" are "dogmatic" assertions and the claim that anyone who holds contrary views is not a real economist. Retired professor in religious studies Roderick Hindery lists positive qualities attributed to political, economic, or other forms of cultural fundamentalism, including "vitality, enthusiasm, willingness to back up words with actions, and the avoidance of facile compromise," as well as negative aspects, such as psychological attitudes, [ which?

In December , the Anglican Archbishop of Wales Barry Morgan criticized what he referred to as "atheistic fundamentalism", claiming that it advocated that religion has no substance and "that faith has no value and is superstitious nonsense.

Fundamentalism

Others have countered that some of these attacks on Christmas are urban legends , not all schools do nativity plays because they choose to perform other traditional plays like A Christmas Carol or The Snow Queen and, because of rising tensions between various religions, opening up public spaces to alternate displays rather than the Nativity scene is an attempt to keep government religion-neutral.

Sociologist of religion Tex Sample asserts that it is a mistake to refer to a Muslim , Jewish , or Christian fundamentalist. Rather, a fundamentalist's fundamentalism is their primary concern, over and above other denominational or faith considerations. In order to carry out the fundamentalist program in practice, one would need a perfect understanding of the ancient language of the original text, if indeed the true text can be discerned from among variants. Furthermore, human beings are the ones who transmit this understanding between generations. Even if one wanted to follow the literal word of God, the need for people first to understand that word necessitates human interpretation.

Through that process human fallibility is inextricably mixed into the very meaning of the divine word. As a result, it is impossible to follow the indisputable word of God; one can only achieve a human understanding of God's will. Howard Thurman was interviewed in the late s for a BBC feature on religion. He told the interviewer:. I say that creeds, dogmas, and theologies are inventions of the mind. It is the nature of the mind to make sense out of experience, to reduce the conglomerates of experience to units of comprehension which we call principles, or ideologies, or concepts.

Religious experience is dynamic, fluid, effervescent, yeasty.