fundamentalism

I grew up Southern Baptist, being baptized by immersion at age 9, some 32 years ago this month. My maternal grandfather served Southern Baptist congregations with honor in Georgia and Mississippi from the teens until his death in 1946. In part becuase of his legacy, but more due to my persistently unanswered questions about Christian faith and God's basic nature, I attended Vanderbilt Divinity School (graduating there in 1988) and eventually served congregations in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) between 1993 and the spring of 2004. I discovered that the fundamentalism of my boyhood was not simply cofined to rightwing interpretations of Scripture. Fundamentalism, in a word, is an attitude that asserts its right to dominance by any means necessary. Since leaving seminary (which intellectually I found stimulating in very important ways), I have spent a good deal of these almost 17 years trying to formulate a working faith in the context of Protestantism. I continue to discover, however, that being one among very few voices in a wilderness of Christians who only want their Pastors and Church executives to "tell me what I want to hear" leads to a dynamic of, as William Faulkner described Flem Snopes, "having eyes like stagnant water." In other words, fundamentalism in any form destroys the life it claims to protect. God does not create and redeem us, I believe, to live the "morality" as arbitrarily designed by someone else. God invites us to live with all the abundance that he (or she) provides.
While I am not dedicating my "blog" solely to a fight against fundamentalism, I do hope that most of our conversations can focus upon different ways to understand faith or even a lack of faith. God is beyond our comprehension: that's my basic premise, which I believe to reflect my Judeo-Christian heritage and the Biblical witness. That being so, let's explore God's nature together in a spirit of acceptance and openness. Such openess is the best way to resist fundamentalism as theology and, more importantly, as Form.