Speculation on Fundamentalism

March 12th, 2008 Posted in Religion

The famous W.C. Fields tombstone message “On the whole I’d rather be in Philadelphia” was based on the blue laws (preventing commercial activity on Sunday) that seemed to close down a large city to the quiet of a small village, so quiet that it only just beat out death in Fields’ list of preferences.

Fundamentalism involves a literal interpretation of basic religious texts that is then imposed on others. Within a general consensus of the people this is neither unusual or resisted, but where peripheral values that lack this consensual support are legislated a resistance follows, a social conflict front is established. The paradigm in the USA for this process is the era of prohibition where alcoholic beverages were first outlawed and then fourteen years later re-instated (1920-1934.)

In general the fundamentalists in their variety have a large list of mini rules that as opportunity offers they lay on the rest of us; included are limits on drink, dance, kisses, gambling, birth control, cursing, sabbath work or play. Also tobacco, abortion, drugs, nudity, erotic literature, evolution, theater, cinema. More affirmatively they support public prayer in any and all institutions and settings.

Those who oppose the fundamentalist project vary by issue. They tend to want to expand the rights of the individual and to free him of these peripheral moral rules. Everyone agrees on limits and liberties but disagrees on type and extent. The fundamentalists need and want more negation; the others, now sometimes called the seculars, want less.

Between the Civil War and World War One a mythic space developed that described the experience of fall followed by salvation. Young men were attracted out of their homesteads into a masculine world free of the restraint of the pure adult life of marriage and participation in good works. They went to the army or navy or to the life of the merchant sailor. They became ranch hands, miners, prospectors for gold, silver or oil, they became outlaws, frontiersmen. Large numbers went to new urban factories. Their free time was spent in saloons, in gambling, visiting prostitutes, and out on the street visibly drunk, brawling. It had the tinsel and metallic music and glitter of a poor, uneducated man’s paradise but always revealed itself, in the hangover, the sickness, the mayhem and sudden death, to be a level of hell. The other side abandoned: the love of a good woman, children, steady and disciplined work, prayer and church going. Good and evil boldly and officially distinguished and expressed in a very strong story line meaningful in a practical way across the entire society.

The cycle was powered by the unresolved oedipal drama in the family and by the expanding factory system and by the search for mineral wealth in the still expanding pioneer frontier. It draws the rural youths outward toward sin and futility. The hope of redemption is in the moral (social work) missionary, like the Salvation Army, Hull House in Chicago, the warm and caring priest in the confessional. On the side of the righteous is the good woman, slightly more modern, a shapely ankle visible, the school teacher or the widowed rancher’s daughter, the girl next door. Awake in the slurry mouthed morning, head aching, the last gun shots echoing, the smell of cordite, the stumbling no longer so young bum gets the vision, the dim call of erotic bliss behind a large promise of salvation. The wayward son, the black sheep, the punished felon returns, now contrite, home.

The key to this story is in its four parts that form a social field: the (1) repression that drives the youth outward into the larger society of opportunity and adventure; (2) the dark side, a bit of hell parading as paradise; (3) the rescue, at its best the pure love and acceptance of the good woman; (4) the light side, the good and steady adult life here and now, the harbinger of the everlasting city to come.

On the female side is a similar story. In early adulthood she falls into the easy life of pleasure, perhaps seduced by the wrong crowd. Partying on dancing, drink, drugs; engaging in casual sex outside of marriage, some become promiscuous, some prostitutes. The fallen girls and women are the consorts of the lost men in Hell’s Kitchen. The call (come back, child) of religious explanation and ritual is usually conveyed by a guru-like figure. Dorothy Day’s biography is paradigmatic. She was an iconic member of the Catholic Worker movement. She lived a casual, liberated life until her pregnancy and conversion. She drove off her atheistic mate. He actually wanted to stay with Dorothy and their child. In the more usual pattern the girl is pregnant and abandoned. Then and finally Dorothy crosses the harbor from Staten Island to the Bowery and dedicates herself to a life of service and poverty—the saving of others as part of the saving of self.

This model of salvation has been replaced, slowly and partially, by the movements of liberation of peoples, genders, and of some carriers of variant social styles. The public definition of evil has narrowed (bad acts and attitudes are redefined as neutral or good) and the stark model of good versus evil becomes muddled.

The modern move happened, the piece by piece dismantling of the legal repressive apparatus, after each American war. The fall of the clubhouse politics (its heavy shadow still remains), prohibition gone, girls in short skirts, prostitution seemingly residual, abortion legal and in the medical clinic, alcohol back, gambling open in casinos, the bookie replaced by the state betting shop, co-education, teaching of evolution required in the schools, religious education separated from the secular–some hope for the availability in the public school of science and the humanities. The fundamentalists pushed back step by step. The revision and reform is not based on a unified ideology and a unified cadre but mainly instead on the people’s need to be liberated. Liberate the suppressed minorities, genders and styles, liberate yourself from the constant vigilance against them. No need for the old form of the good and evil cycle. Let’s get on with life and the challenge of the shadows still haunting us. It turns out that the responsible serious adult life is still there. Those in their moment of strength in life’s cycle joyfully carry the heavy burden of our society and civilization. One model dissolves into another that represents the same civilization.

So behind the fundamentalist clamor and insistence that we return to the state imposition of religious based taboos and requirements is a demand that we return to the full panoply of light and dark, good and evil. That we divide the world again into the very narrowly correct and the broadly drawn underground where the repressed is expressed. Heaven and hell on earth.

The activities whose places in the marginal moral order are contested continue no matter who controls the definitions. What varies is place–underground or in the open. Paradoxically a permissive response ultimately leads to a more rational and measured control. Legal gambling is under state license and is taxed, the activity is orderly and a sense of balance and justice is at play. The other way with emphasis on absolute evil and isolation tends to produce the grotesque in conformity with the good-bad paradigm. The despair and abuse and ugliness of the old Phoenix City, Alabama, the wide-open underground, is the result.

The religious ones continue to strive in their several separate ways to reconstruct the repression and the world of good and evil without which salvation does not make sense. The struggle continues without the consideration that sometimes the lesser evil is in the permissive. They join school boards where they outlaw supposedly smutty and sacrilegious books, trade evolution for creationism. They invade the political realm to re-suppress the unmarried sex life and make abortion illegal . They vote dry, ban the numbers game and the race horses, make the Sabbath quiet. They want to subject the rest of us to public prayer in all gatherings however modest. They put mention of a deity into the pledge of allegiance, the one secular moment previously untouched.

^^^^^

The fundamentalist-secular front is universal, but its content varies from one socio-cultural tradition to another. All that we share is the shell and the shift from the agricultural material order to the technical.

One for the road.

Notes.

On the W.C. Fields quote see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/W._C._Fields…first paragraph.

On Phoenix City, Alabama see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenix_City,_Alabama… second paragraph.

Prohibition in USA gets the usual massive attention on the web. I have picked one article at random. If you are interested there are plenty more to search out. Try searching for the sociology of the prohibition amendment.