A recent op-ed piece by syndicated columnist Cal Thomas (Charleston, SC, Post and Courier, 7-26-11) is typical of Thomas’ glib observations concerning matters religious, cultural and political. In the piece, he abhors, as he should, the atrocity committed by one Anders Behring Breivik, the murdering of a host of innocent people in Breivik’s native Norway, most of whom were young people gathered at a somewhat isolated island youth camp.
Writes Thomas: “Police are calling the gunman . . . a “Christian fundamentalist” . . . (except when describing Muslim fundamentalists . . . police, politicians and much of the media try to avoid [such labeling] for fear of angering Islamists.”) Is Thomas suggesting the distorted stereotype that all Muslims are, after all, “fundamentalists”? Unfortunately, I even know some self-proclaimed “secular humanists” who seem to think the same of all Christians–even if such so-called “free-thinkers” should know better.
Having been “in church,” as it were, all my life, educated–among other places–in two relatively conservative seminaries (one Baptist, one Presbyterian) and being an ordained Christian minister for some forty years, it has become patently obvious that, when it comes to religion, the proverbial “tail seems to wag the dog.” In other words, temperament seems to have more to do with one’s particular religious perspective and practice than the other way around. Even though it is the claim of Christian faith, at least, that such faith is meant to be transforming of one’s temperament and character in positive, uplifting and humanizing ways. What St. Paul calls, in Romans 12, the “renewing of one’s mind”; or Jesus, in John 3, who speaks of “being born new.”
It hardly takes unusual insight to observe that those we tend to consider “fundamentalists”–whether they be Christians, Muslims, secular humanists, or whatever–that what is most characteristic of such folk is less their ideology and more a matter of temperament. Indeed, a temperament that belies a level of insecurity, leading to an exaggerated need to be “right”; a rigid, exclusive posture that eschews much of any sense of ambiguity–morally, emotionally, socially, politically or how/whatever.
In its subtler forms, a fundamentalist temperament may be expressed merely as condescending, if not a tendency toward the judging and condemning, even excluding of others who may hold differing views; or, for that matter, may, in fact, be different. While at its extremes, such a temperament often escalates to forms of violence against “the other.” As in, for instance, Thomas’ reference to the recent Norwegian perpetrator.
Characteristic of Cal Thomas’ carelessly inflated rhetoric, he continues: “Breivik is as much a ‘Christian fundamentalist’ as Judas Iscariot was, and he deserves a similar fate.”
But, of course, Judas was hardly a Christian–fundamentalist or otherwise–anymore than was Jesus. They were both devout Jews, whose differences in temperament reflected notably different theological, ethical–and even political–perspectives; or conversely, whose differences in matters theological, ethical and political reveal such a difference in temperament.
If, at least for a Christian, Jesus’ radical revelation of who God is extended quite beyond a defensive exclusivity regarding his “own kind”–even to the point of “loving his enemies”–not the least of whom would have been, certainly for Judas, the hated Roman imperialists of first-century Israel, Judas was apparently a Zealot, belonging to a recognized Jewish sect committed to the military and political overthrow of their oppressors.
This interpretation of Judas seems optimally credible among those who have studied first-century Judaism with the deepest and most faithfully critical of care. And from a reasonably mature Christian perspective, it would seem to suggest how tragic obsessive “right-ness” often tends to be. As when what we may think is so “right” may be just as “wrong.” Or as someone has said: “Beware of believing half-truths; you my be believing the wrong half!”
