How Fundamentalism Shoots Itself in the Foot

Fundamentalism shoots itself in the foot by telling people that they can’t be good Christians unless they believe in a narrow-minded set of doctrines.

You’ve heard people say that you can’t claim you believe the Bible at all unless you believe all of the Bible. And by this, they mean their own limited and literalistic interpretation of it. If you disagree with even one point, they say, then you have essentially left of faith. And then they wonder why so many people are leaving. Fundamentalists shoot themselves in the foot and then blame the foot for getting shot. Here are just three examples:

1. Creationism Vs. Evolution

I remember hearing Ken Ham from Answers in Genesis making the above claim. All of our biblical understanding, he says, rests on a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis. If you don’t believe that creation took place in six 24-hour cycles, then you don’t believe the Bible. And if you don’t believe the Bible, you’re not a Christian. This kind of narrow view forces people to choose apostasy over fundamentalism, once they start to accept the facts of science.

2. “The Gay Agenda”

My stomach turns every time I hear a fundamentalist say, “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” The gay agenda, they claim, is trying to turn good Christian children into gays. For them, there is only one interpretation of the clobber passages of scripture that mention homosexuality. That interpretation is that it’s all sin, sin, sin. If you believe anything else, then you are saying that the Bible is wrong. And if you don’t believe the Bible, you can’t be a Christian. For fundamentalists, there are no gay Christians. Christians can’t be LGBTQIA+ allies, either. Then, they wonder why Christianity is declining. With all their talk about “biblical marriage,” fundamentalists are shooting the church in the foot, and they don’t even understand how they pulled the trigger.

3. Fundamentalism and Racism

Sprinkle in a little white Christian nationalism, and it gets even worse. God wants the races to stay separate, they say, claiming that God divided people at the tower of Babel. Again, they cite how after the flood, Noah’s sons settled in different regions. They use the curse of Ham to prove their point. They talk about how God forbade the Israelites from marrying Canaanites, and apply that rule to modern interracial relationships. So, if you believe that Black lives really do matter, and then you go to church and hear the opposite, are you more likely to adopt a racist position to accommodate fellow parishioners, or are you more likely to leave the church? If you are a member of a white, fundamentalist, Southern church and then you marry a Black man, the conservative churchgoers will likely make you both feel unwelcome before long. But then they’ll wonder why you left the church. They just shot themselves in the foot.

Thought Experiments

I could give more examples, but you get the point. You could try a few thought experiments to see if you would remain in a church like that. Imagine that you are a Venezuelan immigrant, and you are visiting a church in the United States that is full of white Christian nationalists. Or imagine that you are a woman or a divorced man, wanting to be ordained as a deacon in a fundamentalist church. Or picture yourself as a teenager raised in a fundamentalist church, where you can’t come out as a different gender from your body. Would you stay in a church like that?

Chances are that you would leave your fundamentalist church and find a more open-minded and inclusive church. Or, if fundamentalists had you convinced that theirs was the only true brand of Christianity, then you would leave the faith altogether. And all the people at your home church would wonder why you left.

Why the Church is Declining

Conservative Christians wonder why the church is declining in the West. All the while, they are immovable as a mountain and as dead as a gravestone. This is not what Jesus meant when he said, “On this rock I will build my church.” The church is built on the testimony that Christ is Lord. All of these other things are just details. When the church lives or dies on creationism, gender and sexuality issues, race and nationalism, or anything else peripheral to the gospel, it does a disservice to the very people they’re trying to reach. The church ties “heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others, but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.”  And then they wonder why folks leave.

Thirty years ago, pastors could go to conferences on church growth. Fifteen years ago they shifted to focusing on church health, understanding that growth was too much to expect. Now, conferences talk about damage control and managing decline. I know pastors who describe themselves as hospice chaplains for dying congregations, focused only on palliative care.

Is There a Solution?

I offer a simple solution to all of this. Stop driving people away by insisting that unless they believe like you, they aren’t real Christians. This attitude only proves to people that if their viewpoint diverges, they need to leave the church. The way to keep your church from dying is to stop shooting yourself. In fact, you might even consider taking the bullets out of your gun entirely.