by VorJack
There have been a number of books recently in which a person with little or no religious sentiment goes to a fundamentalist church or school, just to see what it’s like from the inside. The people involved rarely have the sort of training that allows them to come out with any deep insight.
This is not the case with James Ault, a sociologist who studied various conservative religious movements in America and spent three years attending a fundamentalist church. The result is a documentary and a book, Spirit and Flesh.
There’s a lengthy summary of the book over at Blog on the Way. I don’t want to summarize the summary, but here’s a taste:
Ault’s most disarming and perceptive insight is that Fundamentalism, though it emphasizes reliance on the sacred Scripture, is primarily a religion in the Oral Tradition. The beliefs, which have a certain flexibility, are disseminated through the sermons and lessons and by person-to-person conversation. People share sermons, pass around tapes, and attend conferences where they hear the leaders of the religion make their pronouncements. Bible reading, rather than being systematic or scholarly, is performed selectively in order to “hide God’s Word in the heart,” which is a euphemism for memorization. At the appropriate time, learned texts are slapped onto a situation. But sermons carry the beliefs and transmit them. Bible reading serves the sermons.
[...]
Ault’s next most disarming insight is that Fundamentalism relies upon situation ethics. He expressed surprise that the preacher, a man he came to admire, would thunder that divorce was always wrong, and everybody would shout “Amen!” yet several people in the church were divorced. They felt no incongruity about condemning divorce yet also being divorced. Ault learned that the Fundamentalist mindset believed that it believed in the absolutes that it claimed, yet the culture was one of addressing every situation individually and evaluating it in light of multiple factors. While remaining conservative and morally strict, Fundamentalism, nonetheless, relied upon situation for its moral decisions, not absolutes. Divorce, in the end, was NOT always wrong if a situation was one that was intolerable or “unavoidable”. The people, he noted, saw no contradiction in what they said vs what they actually practiced. They thought they believed in an absolute morality, and they practiced situation ethics.
Jeri Massi, the blogger at Blog on the Way, is herself a former fundamentalist. She still Christian, but she’s made a study of her former community, and she’s able to provide a list of the aspects of Fundamentalism that Ault and other scholars have picked up on.
Sounds very interesting. I particularly like the idea of fundamentalists being considered worthy of sociological study. By learning more about their mindset, we might be better prepared to oppose them effectively.
The people, he noted, saw no contradiction in what they said vs what they actually practiced. They thought they believed in an absolute morality, and they practiced situation ethics.
I’m pretty sure that everyone (absent Inspector Javert) practices situational ethics. People can fool themselves into thinking they are pursuing a universally applicable moral, but in the end it’s all about where the rubber hits the road.
Absolutely. Moral absolutism just doesn’t work in the real world. Ask any person who says that they believe themselves to be morally above committing physical violence against a fellow human being the following question: If you came home one day and found a man raping your spouse / child / parent / significant other, how far would you go to stop him?
Ah, the Dukakis question.
Well, sort of – but he was answering about what happens after the event. I’m talking about what you’d do at the time.
The problem is, they’ll still f*ing vote in line with moral absolutism.
Yup. This is what happens when people don’t have enough confidence in the evident rightness of their moral positions; they clamor for the state to enforce them. Never mind that laws have at best a weak correlation with behavior change, and I suspect that couldn’t possibly matter less to these folks.
And just because I’ve been on a Nietzsche kick lately:
“One might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were, through and through, immoral.”
“The craving for a strong faith is no proof of a strong faith, but quite the contrary. If one has such a faith, then one can afford the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is sure enough, firm enough, has ties enough for that.”
These people, generally speaking, have very *weak* faith by that standard.
Well, yes, but we do have the judicial branch in place, which (I think can be argued) applies a situational approach even to the most absolutist of laws.
I wish.
Remember kids, actual innocence is not enough to gain your freedom.
All that trial indicates is that a person convicted of a crime does not have the right to a retrial later if there were no constitutional objections to the original trial. I don’t agree with it in this case, but it is not an unreasonable ruling. There wasn’t a lot to actually demonstrate Herrera’s innocence, and had he had a retrial, he probably would have been convicted again.
Courts (such as recently the 9th Circuit CoA here (pdf)) have maintained this principle even in cases that would meet Blackmun’s standard of “likely innocence”, that even an unchallenged showing of actual innocence would not be sufficient to meet the statutory burden for habeas relief after timeliness considerations have expired.
This jibes with my experience. “A certain flexibility” – more like 52 Pick-up. It’s the church of “ideas I like.” Not only is modern Christianity a “personal” religion, it’s one that can change dramatically during a person’s lifetime. What I tell people who bug me for being an atheist is “You confer among the various sects and come to a consensus on what the 10 commandments actually mean, and what Jesus actually said, and then get back to me.”
Yes, I agree totally with James Ault’s study. On the reverse side atheist relies on situation ethics as well. An example that comes to mind is the saying “there are no atheist in fox holes”.
On the reverse side atheist relies on situation ethics as well.
Yes, but we admit it. As stated by commentors above, there’s really no one who doesn’t practice such ethics. I suspect that reality is just too complex and dynamic to support an unchanging morality.
An example that comes to mind is the saying “there are no atheist in fox holes”.
1. I don’t see how this illustrates your point.
2. Atheists in Foxholes
Thanks for the link! I’ve been in a position that was fired upon several times, and I never heard anyone making deals with god- no time for reflection. I guess if someone was pinned down in a foxhole for hours or facing certain execution one might start pleading with the void.
I am reading the list of “Atheists in Foxholes, in Cockpits, and on Ships” on that site, and one testimony I’d like to share (emphasis mine):
Navy Petty Officer First Class William B Friday
Dates of service: Aug 1976 – Aug 1996
Good to know. Good insight. Even Christians are atheists in foxholes.
Thanks for sharing that site, I like reading the individual stories of the military-atheist experience. I guess for the purposes of dog tags and believers, given that they are risking life, religious affiliations belong there, for last rites or whatever, but I still don’t like that the military has prayers and in some units, open proselytizing and discrimination of atheists. I think, like in the US civilian domain, if someone chooses to believe, we let them observe and practice. You can pray in school, the administration cannot lead you in prayer. Why is the US military allowed to ignore the 1st amendment so boldly? I see that many of the atheists who serve in the military just kept their heads up during prayer and didn’t seem to mind that, but many had it worse, were ganged up on by proselytizing COs and discriminated against assignments they applied for. I also see that many who were not atheists when they joined up actually deconverted due to their experiences in the military and combat, or at least it kicked the last leg of support for belief out.
vorjack-
Yea, I did not think you would. It is an old soldier term. nazani14 explained it well. When faced with self preservation (illness, dying, war, lack of finances etc…) some atheist have called out to God. Seen many attempt to come into the faith just for these reason.
Yeah, but the point is, it still doesn’t illustrate your point, which was that Atheists by and large use situational ethics. Calling to God out of desperation hardly has a considered ethical dimension, and isn’t primarily a moral choice, but an existential one.
Not like the point needs illustrating, since Vorjack and I and others have already gladly acceded to the point that Atheists are as disposed as everyone else to take the idiosyncrasies of each situation into account when attempting to determine the right course of action.
That’s something Christians tend to say, not atheists. And atheists are living in the real world with situation ethics. Fundamentalists and others who assert a moral absolutism tend to come up with other rationalizations rather than recognize there is no moral absolute.
In my opinion, more important than moral rules is moral experience. Ethics is a skill; people who learn how to reason through to choose a good path in a variety of circumstances do better when confronted with an unusual situation than those who approach morality programmatically. Here the emphasis is not so much on morality, but on the moral agent who must apply it.
That’s one of the issues that rarely seems to be addressed in the situational ethics/moral absolutism spectrum. Back when I was going to church an awful lot of time was spent trying to figure out what the Bible said about seemingly difficult (but not actually all that difficult, really) topics. There was an attempt to programatically find answers by choosing proof texts and it took forever. And the entire thing relied upon the idea that the way the people looking for answers were approaching the Bible was that this particular form of exegesis was correct.
So they want to know whether homosexuality is okay. They go through and find all of the proof texts that say that homosexuality is bad and say, “See, it’s like this. God hates fags.” But in the process they completely ignore all of the bits of the Bible about loving others and leaving judgment to god. But if someone else comes up and points that out the response is, “Well you’re just not reading the Bible right.”
In the end they go through all of this work to find a terrible answer that’s easily refuted from their own text. Or you end up with unworkable compromise solutions like, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” How does that work if you’re trying to love someone who you define according to their sin, especially when that person may not necessarily see that attribute as being sinful in any way?
Whereas if you have a simple ethics that says, “Treat other people well,” you don’t have to programatically look through anything to figure out how to treat someone. And if you see someone who is being a jerk, or you run in to someone who is a jerk to you, it’s fairly easy to back up and say, “I will see if I can resolve this situation with kindness, but if the other party proves intractable I will respond in a way that is necessary.” And each time you run in to a similar situation you can use that as your baseline and use previous instances of running in to jerks to inform you of when to escalate, when to walk away, or when to be conciliatory.
But if it’s something as simple as, “I’m straight, that person’s gay,” but you get along just fine there is absolutely no problem that needs to be solved. I don’t need to page through a Bible to figure out how to treat people who are nice and good people and don’t give me any trouble.
FWIW, I find Jesus to be far more comprehensible (and palatable) if interpreted through a virtue/experiential ethics frame than through a rule-giving frame. Which would be more historically appropriate anyway; the Greek tradition of Aristotle-derived virtue ethics was in full swing by that point in the Greek and Latin speaking world, and in particular his gentile audience would have understood him in that way. Even among contemporaneous Jewish scholars, the emphasis was more on what makes a person good than what makes an action good.
I’d say we can agree on that idea. In fact, it’s almost impossible to evaluate the Jesus stories from an entirely pre-Alexander Jewish setting, since the Levant had become largely Hellenized, no matter what the history-allergic Christian scholars would have us believe. So the idea of evaluating Jesus through a Greek lens isn’t just a good idea, it’s necessary.
Also, a thought just occurred to me. I recently met a woman who’s really quite cool. She’s divorced. This concerns me from a standpoint of, “How much baggage is there?” which is heightened by how recent this particular development is in her life. But I’ve accepted that when you’re 29 and dating people your own age that’s pretty much going to become an occupational hazard, just not one that I have had to grapple with yet in my (less than interesting) dating life.
According to strict Biblical principles, though, if she starts something with me she’s committing adultery (I’ve forgotten what it actually means for me, though…). The only acceptable options for her are to be celibate forever or be, y’know, stoned. And not in the happy smoky way.
It’s actually a horrible ethical system that says I have to ignore the possibility of this entirely likeable person finding happiness and the possibility of me finding happiness because some passage written by a cranky old misogynist in a dusty old book says that god doesn’t like it if you have more than one sexual partner in your life. That’s pretty much the opposite of ethical.
Well, I’ve been in life-threatening situations more than once, and personally I remained an atheist and got on with trying to get myself the hell out of them. You might think it more productive to stop and pray while somebody tries to stab you, but personally my own response is a little more robust and a lot more violent.
I’ve never understood how “there are no atheists in foxholes” is a point in favor of religion. What it is, is a testament to the fact that the human mind is ready to hope for and believe in miracles when circumstances become sufficiently desperate.
To me, that simply illustrates how religious faith is often a coping mechanism that people cling to in times of hardship. Desperate people tend to invent the same escapist ideas, which suggests some interesting things about why we have religion. It doesn’t exactly strengthen the case for God’s existence that we know humans tend to come up with religious ideas when they need some outlet for their frustration.
Thanks for the link, vorjack. I’m going to give this review a thorough read this evening, and most likely, I will end up purchasing this book. I had a prof. in college who did something similar. Due to a very unfortunate series of events in the academy, his work never made it to publication. I would guess that his conclusions are similar to the author’s above. Fascinating stuff.
The notin of “absolute morality” is a Western ideal slapped over a series of moral and ethical precepts given well before that concept was given so much weight. In spite of what Fundamentalists say, the Bible itself teaches that learned elders must come together to make decisions. Right and wrong are not always that apparent, and the Bible is pretty clear about that. I apologize for tooting my own horn (toot! toot!), but after consulting with a longtime Jewish friend who is very well read on Jewish history, I did write a rebuttal to the unflinching dictates handed out by Christian Fundamentalist leaders about this person or that person, after they take a superficial glance at a matter. The Old Testament, too often evaluated as unyielding in its justice, was interpreted very differently in the past than the way Christian Fundamentalists now interpret it, by men who also believed it was the inspired Word of God. Here are three essays addressing the usual Fundamentalist errors in approachng the way to apply Old Testament Law to current situations:
http://jeriwho.net/lillypad2/?p=2072
http://jeriwho.net/lillypad2/?p=2099
http://jeriwho.net/lillypad2/?p=2107
Not exactly, a proper reading of the verses shows the ‘adultery’ to be past tense, The breaking of a covenant i.e. the marriage contract. The RCC has this view until the counsel of Trent when they wanted to bring marriage ‘up’ a few notches and make it a sacrament. The problem is when actually reading the verses with the RCC idea -no divorce- it literally makes no sense and puts Jesus at odds with Deuteronomy- essentially himself since he was God.
A more correct reading has Jesus saying the breaking of the marriage convenant was a sin not a later action. Thats just illogical and stupid. In this regard I give fundies the benefit of the doubt. They may legitimately think divorce wrong but at times necessary. I don’t feel this makes them dishonest in there beliefs at least in regards to this particular issue.
Gee, cognitive dissonance in fundies. Who could have guessed?
“You can tell you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” – Anne Lamott
” The people, he noted, saw no contradiction in what they said vs what they actually practiced. They thought they believed in an absolute morality, and they practiced situation ethics.”
LOL! So fundies *are* hypocrites, then? Shock and surprise!