How I Define Fundamentalism

The foil of deconstruction: a working definition

When writing about deconstruction, it’s impossible not to write about fundamentalism. That is what people are deconstructing out of, after all. However, It’s difficult to write about fundamentalism because, much like the word deconstruction itself, fundamentalism has become a junk drawer term to mean whatever the person using it wants it to mean. That means that when we use the word “fundamentalism”— just like “deconstruction”—it’s helpful to define what we mean when we say it.

The words fundamentalism and deconstruction have in common the fact that they both have an actual history that pre-loads the word with meaning even though both words have come to be used differently than their historical context. Fundamentalism came to prominence as a series of books that set out to define the basics of the Christian faith in opposition to the liberalism that was on the rise in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Deconstruction was originally used by Jacques Derrida as a perspective of the relationship between a text and its meaning. Using these words in line with their original context is both correct and can be potentially misleading as they have left the farm where they were raised, so to speak, and have come to refer to things beyond what they were intended.

What Fundamentalism Was

Originally, fundamentalism simply meant someone who adhered to the basics of Christianity. Beliefs such as the deity and atonement of Christ, the inspiration and authority of the Bible, the sinfulness of humanity, the reality of the supernatural, and other basic Christian teachings. If this is fundamentalism, then I’m a fundamentalist. There isn’t anything inherently controversial about this. But fundamentalism has always brought with it an imbalance as it focuses primarily on the individual at the expense of Christianity’s social imperatives. As Carl Henry wrote in 1947,

“Modern Fundamentalism does not explicitly sketch the social implications of its message for the non-Christian world; it does not challenge the injustices of the totalitarianisms, the secularisms of modern education, the evils of racial hatred, the wrongs of current labor-management relations, the inadequate bases of international dealings. It has ceased to challenge Caesar and Rome, as though in futile resignation and submission to the triumphant Renaissance mood. The apostolic Gospel stands divorced from a passion to right the world. The Christian social imperative is today in the hands of those who understand it in sub-Christian terms.”

In other words, fundamentalism often divorces orthodoxy (right belief) from orthopraxy (right living), especially in terms of how orthopraxy plays out beyond the individual. Because fundamentalism has little to say beyond the individual and leaves most social issues in the hands of non-Christians, to quote Henry again, “Protestant evangelicalism without a world program has largely relegated itself to a secondary, or even more subordinate, role of challenge to the prevailing cultural mood.”

By becoming primarily a critique of the prevailing cultural mood, fundamentalism itself has become primarily a mood, not just a set of doctrines one believes. The problem, then, is that if fundamentalism is a mood, it becomes even more difficult to define. It’s less definable than a doctrinal statement and becomes more of an “I know it when I see it” thing—which isn’t that helpful, to say the least. When fundamentalism is only a mood, it’s susceptible to being defined as “anyone to my right,” which makes the individual the axis at which point fundamentalism begins and ends and inadvertently creates a rightward magnetic force that pulls people who are concerned about showing their conservative bona fides farther and farther right since you can always find someone who is more conservative than you are.

What Fundamentalism Is

A fundamentalist can’t simply be anyone who is to my right and is more confident and certain than I am. What’s odd about defining it this way is that it ignores a progressive version of fundamentalism that is on the other side of the horseshoe from conservative fundamentalism. So however we think about fundamentalism, it needs to be a mood that can exist on both the right and the left. If it’s a mood that exists at both ends of the ideological spectrum, what is the mood?

My working theory is that the fundamentalist mood is an anxious mood. I don’t mean anxiety as in clinical anxiety, I mean the chronic anxiety described by Edwin Friedman in his seminal work, A Failure of Nerve. For Friedman, chronic anxiety can affect individuals, families, institutions, and societies of any size—this is why it can also apply to churches. He describes chronically anxious environments as having five characteristics and three causes.

The five characteristics of a chronically anxious environment are:

1. Reactivity: the vicious cycle of intense reactions of each member to events and to one another.

2. Herding: a process through which the forces of togetherness triumph over the forces for individuality and move everyone to adapt to the least mature members.

3. Blame displacement: an emotional state in which members focus on forces that have victimized them rather than taking responsibility for their own being and destiny.

4. A quick-fix mentality: a low threshold for pain that constantly seeks symptom relief rather than fundamental change.

5. Lack of well-differentiated leadership: a failure of nerve that both stems from and contributes to the first four.

The three causes are:

1. An unending treadmill of trying harder.

2. Looking for answers instead of reframing questions.

3. Either/or thinking that creates false dichotomies.

The result of these factors is what Friedman calls Imaginative Gridlock. This is when someone’s imagination becomes stuck and they can’t imagine a reality beyond the environment they are in. It’s primarily an emotional process before it is a cognitive process.

Now, why do I say that the anxious mood is what constitutes fundamentalism today? Let’s take a stab at describing these factors in a few sentences and see what it sounds like. While reading, imagine any church that you associate with the word “fundamentalist.”

A church that requires ideological certainty and purity in adherence, that doesn’t tolerate difference and reacts against anyone who questions their beliefs or system. They never take the blame for their failures and consistently shift the blame to the accuser. The church doesn’t allow flexibility and understanding of individual circumstances but forces people into conforming with the group, which is usually dictated by the narrow interpretations of the leaders that exist to protect their status and/or ego. If any problems arise, instead of dealing with the complexity, the agitator is shut down and quickly dismissed from the church. Anyone who doesn’t consistently keep up with the church’s rigid standards is considered a problem. The environment this creates is one where the people inside of it are hardly aware of anything different that isn’t considered a threat and the only options are to either submit and conform to the church or to break free by any means necessary.

Maybe I’m alone in this, but to me, that sounds exactly like the fundamentalist mood that I and so many others have experienced.

What Fundamentalism Isn’t

There are a lot of things I’m not saying in this. I’m not saying churches shouldn’t have standards of belief and behavior. I’m not saying they shouldn’t exercise church discipline. I’m not saying individuals shouldn’t conform at all to the group. I’m not saying churches shouldn’t practice membership. It’s not that these things exist, but in how they are handled. Is it reactive? Is it consistently shifting blame? Is it rigidly ideological and conformist? Is there no tolerance for pain and discomfort? Is there no place for serendipity, growth, and discovery?

This is why it’s important not to describe fundamentalism as simply a set of characteristics like a belief in basic Christian doctrines and morality, the practice of church discipline, etc. These things can be done anxiously and non-anxiously. The fundamentalist church is anxious in ways that gridlock the imagination of its congregation. The non-anxious church can hold to all of the same things but allow people to change, grow, and adapt over time without the need for control and instant, pure conformity, and allowing for the complexities of life.

Fundamentalism and Deconstruction

So when I talk about fundamentalism—both on the right and on the left—I’m talking about anxiety. You could call it Anxious Fundamentalism or Fundamentalist Anxiety or whatever. But it seems to me that these characteristics describe exactly what I’m getting at when I use the word “fundamentalism.”

Deconstruction, then, is what happens when the Anxious Fundamentalist system breaks down for an individual and they struggle to become imaginatively un-gridlocked; emotionally unstuck from the anxious environment. That creates more anxiety in the short-term but offers freedom in the long-term. Without being clear on what people are deconstructing out of, it’ll be hard to understand what is behind deconstruction at all. This, of course, is not the entire picture. But it is a large piece of the puzzle that has to be understood if deconstruction is to be understood at all.

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I’ve written a book about deconstruction. It’s called Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith. It’s deeply personal, but it’s not a memoir. It’s an attempt to serve the church, to help the church understand what deconstruction is, what causes it, and how to walk with people who are experiencing it.