Ivan Richmond - On Christian Extremism

Ivan Richmond's Website

On Christian Extremism

What values should we have with regard to religion? This is a complex question. First, we must acknowledge that we live in a society founded on the values of certain freedoms. Two of these freedoms are freedom of religion and a separation of Church and State.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The Treaty of Tripoli, signed into law in 1797 by our second president and Founding Father John Adams says, "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." Another Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, said that we should have what he called a "wall of separation between Church and State" (Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists ). George Washington was even opposed to chaplains in the military (Letter to John Hancock, 1777).

Therefore, all good Americans must first and foremost seat their view of religion firmly upon this foundation. We are called by our common inherited national values to respect one another regardless of religious beliefs. We are called to affirm the wall of separation of Church and State as an insurmountable and permanent division. Anyone in our nation who says otherwise is a bad American!

Thus, part of our Great American Covenant of Freedom is the vow that all of us will respect people of all religions as long as those people are willing to do the same. This covenant is that we must respect everyone's right to freedom of religion and a separation of Church and State, regardless of our religion, so long as people of other religions do so as well. The only religious groups, therefore, that fall outside of this Great American Ethic are those who refuse to affirm it.

Now, at the beginning of the Twenty-first Century, just when we thought progress had been made from the savage dominion of the Catholic Church over the feudal slaves of Christendom (and its various usurpers: the Church of England, the Puritans of the British Interregnum, and so forth),* just when we thought we lived in a modern, civilized nation in which the Great American Covenant prevailed over witch hunts and inquisitions, a religious force came onto our radars and television screens. This was the savage specter of Christian Extremism.

The Christian Extremists have been around for a long time, but it seems like it's only recently that we see the news media and politicians actually caring what they think. Make no mistake. They're gunning for us!

The Christian Extremists believe that their way is the one, right, true and only way and that everyone else will burn in Hell. Now, so far, we should still respect their religious freedom. However, they cross a line that other Christians, even moderate-conservative ones, refuse to cross. Many Christians of all stripes, liberal, moderate and even moderate-conservative, view their belief as faith. If you confront them with the lack of evidence for God, for example, they'll simply shrug and say that they take God on faith. They'll affirm your right to have different religious views, because they see their religious beliefs as matters of faith as opposed to matters of fact meriting political attention. In fact, they'll understand their faith as being a gift from our Founding Fathers, precisely because freedom of religion allows them the safety to publicly affirm their faith. Not so with the Christian Extremists!

The liberal, moderate and even moderate-conservative Christians are good Americans. They more-or-less keep the Great American Covenant by at least striving to separate their religious faith from matters of state. Hence, regardless of our religious convictions, they deserve our respect for upholding their part in the Great American Covenant.

The Christian Extremists, on the other hand, take their beliefs as "fact." I recently spoke with Dr. Steven Tipton, a professor of the Sociology of Religion at Emory University, who is, some say, one of the nation's leading experts on American Christianity. He said that Christian Extremists see their religious beliefs as being at the same level as mathematical fact, such as 2+2=4. If science differs from their religious beliefs, they view science as "wrong".

They are trying to legislate their religious beliefs into law, and to destroy the wall of separation of Church and State on a legal level. They think prayer, even school-sponsored prayer, should be allowed in Public School. Clearly, as institutions of the State, Public Schools should be devoid of any organized religious activity if Thomas Jefferson's sacred Wall of Separation is to remain up.

The Christian Extremists think that it should be illegal for a woman to take a pill to end her pregnancy, even when the pregnancy is only a few days old and even if the woman is a rape victim. It is a biological fact that the zygote, the fertilized egg, is a microscopic organism incapable of suffering, whereas a woman is capable of suffering. It is elementary ethics to conclude that it's completely within ethical parameters for the woman to end the pregnancy at this stage, since she is the only party capable of suffering (if a microscopic organism can even be called a party!). So, the only secular view on the legality of this matter that I can see is that such a pill should be legal.**

Yet, the Christian Extremists believe that the soul comes into the zygote at the time of conception. On those grounds, they think that ending the pregnancy at this state is wrong. When the soul enters a living being or whether or not there even is a soul is clearly a religious question, however. The fact that they want to make it illegal for a woman to end her pregnancy at this stage because of this belief clearly steps completely over the boundary of the wall of separation of church and state. They are attempting to legislate their religious beliefs into law.

I recently interviewed my dear friend Valerie Voigt on this matter. Valerie was raised Fundamentalist Christian in Birmingham, Alabama. Now she has left that religion behind completely. "I regard myself as an escapee from a cult," Valerie says. She told me that many Fundamentalists she grew up with didn't even believe in our Constitution or Bill of Rights. Some saw freedom of religion and a separation of Church and State as only a stopgap before Christ returns, she told me. Others, she said, were opposed to them entirely. She even said that some of them talked about murdering people who were not Christian Extremists.

Christian Extremists have defiled our Great American Covenant. They are bad Americans!

However, it gets worse. Conservative Christians claim that their religion is far more civilized that the so-called "primitive" cultures they send missionaries to. In actuality, though, it resembles primitive religiosity far more than conservative Christians would care to admit.

The noted mythologist Joseph Cambell pointed out, in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, that many tribal cultures, which in his day were labeled "primitive" have tribal totem animals. Tribe members are initiated into the cult of that totem. Their tribal identity centers religiously and mythologically around that tribal totem. When they have disagreements or even wars with other tribes, they tend to see their totem as superior to those of other tribes.

He pointed out that a whole major form that Christianity too often takes (and has taken throughout history) is identical to this sort of totemic religiosity. The tribe is Christendom. The totem is Christ. Rather than understanding the story of Jesus in terms of transcendence, in which all of humanity is to be loved and cherished and is equally worthy of entering God's Kingdom, Christians in this sort of totemic Christianity divide humanity into Christians and non-Christians.

This becomes an excuse for war, conquest, cruelty and in some cases atrocities bordering on genocide. In the conquest of the Native Americans by the United States, for example, sending them smallpox-infected blankets were considered within the bounds of ethical behavior because the Native Americans were deemed to be "going to Hell, anyway."

We still see this sort of attitude among modern Christian Extremists. They'll often say things like, "we'll let God sort it out", when they, say, bomb an abortion clinic while people are still inside. There are Christian Extremists who seem to apply the same attitude to the invasion of Iraq, lauding it as an opportunity to send in Missionaries to convert Muslims. It is not so much that they're proselytizing as that they're encouraging war in order to do so.

In the epilogue of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell describes this type of Christianity as nothing more than a nationalistic parade. Campbell loved the Jesus story, lauding it as one of the great hero epics of humanity, in which the hero, Jesus, transcends all, even his own life, for the greater good.

Yet, Campbell feared that Christendom itself had fallen from the transcendence of Christ to primitive tribalism precisely because of it doctrine of exclusivity: the doctrine that claims that only Christians will go to Heaven and everyone else will go to Hell.

This doctrine divides Christians from the rest of humanity, destroying, as Campbell saw it, the very transcendence that Jesus experienced. Campbell's wish for Christianity in 1949 when he wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces was that Christianity, and similar religions like Judaism and Islam, would move away from this primitive totem cult to world religions that would fully embrace all human beings as brothers and sisters capable of goodness regardless of religion.

Many liberal and moderate Christian groups have made exactly that switch. Many non-extreme ministers teach that all good people will go to Heaven, regardless of their religious beliefs. They say things like, "we all worship the same God." They have learned the lessons of the past and grown into the needs of modernity.

It is only the Christian Extremists who straggle behind, determined to fight bloody wars in the name of their primitive totem cult. And, yet, they act like good, upstanding Americans, when in reality they are anti-American regressives: wolves in sheeps' clothing.

I've heard many say that we should do nothing about this. People have told me, "doing anything only validates their position". Unfortunately, my friends, these un-American bibliolaters have already been validated by the news media and those politicians who have endorsed them, or who are even members of their ranks! Worse, there are many Fascists and radical conservatives who are cynically using them for their own gains (the George W. Bush administration, for example).

The Christian Extremists are already waging war against our national values and our Great American Covenant. They are already legislating their religion into law, to the exclusion of all others and to the detriment of our nation.

I call upon all Americans of every political persuasion that affirms of national values to fight this internal enemy. It is our duty to fight them with words and with speeches, we must fight them with rallies and protests, we are called to fight them with petitions and movements. We are obliged to fight them with letters and emails to our representatives, to our Senators and to the President. Our nation's founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the revolution that founded this great nation. I call upon all good Americans to honor that sacrifice and rise up against this threat so that we may safeguard the sacred legacy that our founders left to us.

* I want to make it clear that I'm decrying the past sins of the Catholic Church and other such institutions. In bygone centuries, the Catholic Church was responsible for the Inquisition, for example, under which countless Jews and Muslims were tortured and killed. Under them and other such institutions, witch hunts were carried out against the innocent. However, I realize that the present day Catholic Church has already apologized for the doings of their ancestors and now condemns such acts. I have great respect for Catholicism and all of the Catholics I've met in my life have been good, admiral people.

** Please note that I'm separating my views on the ethics of taking a pill several days after a pregnancy from other related issues, such as whether third trimester abortions should be legal. I think it's perfectly within the rights of any given American to, say, believe in outlawing third trimester abortions. My only point is that when we're talking about a woman ending her pregnancy when she still only has a microscopic organism inside of her, the only argument I can think of for outlawing that is inherently religious.

On Christian Extremism

Suggested Reading