Crosses and Mistletoe: Paganism & Christian Fundamentalism

I got a bit of feedback on my most recent post on Christmas.  I thought a few of my readers might be interested in this email from a former student (with her permission):

My dad managed to screw up Christmas morning a little bit. Presents were opened, bellies were full, the family was sitting around a fire, and he decides that now is the time to bring up how un-Christian Christmas is.

You see, my father is devoutly anti-pagan. It has been brought to his attention that many of the Christmas traditions stem from pagan traditions. He does not like this. He tried to pull this once before, when I was a child, and I snapped at him. I snapped worse today. He took away Halloween, he took away Barney, he took away The Magic School bus, but HELL if I'm going to let him take away Christmas.Springing the Trap With Works-Related Giftings. Agent of Paganism St. Nicholas of Smyrna Seduces True Christians From Secret Ice Fortress. Good Christian Men, Freak Out In Front of Your Children With Heart and Soul and Voice.

The argument has already ruined some of the magic, though.

The argument being that anything not explicitly mentioned in the Bible as being good and true is obviously sent from the devil in an attempt to confuse us. If it came from the pagans, it MUST be evil. When he hears the word "pagan" his mind automatically balls itself into a little shell and just throws out defensive phrases parroted from people whose view aligns with his, never listening to either the argument or himself. (One of his favorites that works for any argument is "I am the father." Because apparently if you are a woman or a child you don't have a brain and trying to is disrespectful.)

[. . . .]

[Christians] latched on to those things that were compatible with Christianity and altered the connotations a little. "What? They already have a temple? Just stick a cross on the top of it and call it a church. They worship the sun? Associate it with the Son. They have a mid-winter celebration of light and life? Say that's when Jesus was born." Taking up with existing practices in a region is a part of our culture and a part of our heritage and I don't see anything wrong with it.

But again, he can't see that. He can't even try to understand where I'm coming from. And his hatefulness makes me hate him. I don't want to hate him. I don't want to hate anyone, much less my father. And here comes the irony: his avid defense of Christianity from paganism pushes me more toward paganism. Because half the time, pagans get Christianity better than Christians do. It's the Buddhists and the back-to-Mother-Earth hippies that know how to love the way Jesus wanted us to love. And that's the kind of love I want to have, for everyone. And then I hear a quote from Death in my head: "You can never really be mad at someone if you know them well enough."

I don't know daddy well enough. I have no idea where he's coming from. I don't understand why it is that he is so afraid of anything that goes against his worldview. I don't know why he clings so desperately to his version of the Bible. I can't figure it out. But it helps to try. Looking at him for him and looking at the way he interacts with me are two very different things. When I look at him from an objective third-person view and see how limited his mind and his world are, I pity him. I'm a long way from being able to put this view into practice when he riles me up, and I still need to figure out how to break him out if it -- for his sake and mine. But I think and hope and pray that I'm getting better. And if there's any time of year to try, it's now. Merry Christmas."

I have little to add to what she's written here.

I'm not sure that it's fair to say Christians don't love as well as Buddhists or hippies or pagans: I've known plenty of assholes all over the spectrum.  And I'm not entirely sure that her description of "sticking crosses on temples" is quite accurate to the semi-mythic mind that drove Christian evangelism in the first five centuries or so.

But her note makes painfully plain that fundamentalism places a bracket around a convert's life and ideas, and it's only with great pain that it can be broken into or out of.  It's an isolating thing.

And this is difficult partly because the fundamentalist person says that he or she is just standing up for the truth, and we'd all agree truth is important.

There's a story first told by Walter Hooper about Bob Jones, the ultraconservative American fundamentalist, meeting C.S. Lewis and remarking, "That man smokes a pipe, and that man drinks liquor -- but I do believe he is a Christian!"  I think that the entrance and egress of fundamentalism must come from well-living people of different ideas, from the "thoroughly converted" (to borrow Hooper's phrase about Lewis).  As my student suggests about Buddhists and hippies, it's tough to argue with people who just know how to love other people really well. 

But the tragedy for some Christians is that their love is overlaid with enormous, expensive mechanisms for keeping their children in the fold: home schooling, indoctrination, rigid attendance in churches, a corral of things-you-can't-do-or-read-or-see-or-hear, and a weirdly plastic, ghettoized culture of its own to substitute for the evil things, a culture that's almost mandatory to master if you want to get along in Christian circles. 

But those are just rules, and by now fundamentalism should have figured out that people flee tyranny, not because we're fallen but because we're made free.

I'll close this one with another letter from a recovering fundamentalist reader whose daughter has finally been allowed to see the Harry Potter films... and once again the word "hate" looms like a shadow under fundamentalism, that belief that slavery of the mind is good enough if it's to the truth as best we see it:Do Not Read This Book. You Will Get Naked With Horses. Flee the Unclean Thing.

Of course, she's also reading the books, and so am I. They've always been on my list, because I wanted to be able to intelligently defend the position we took: the books are dangerous gates into the wide world of Satanism. I just never was able to read them without being in "outright rebellion", or worse-"weak and easy prey for cults and false religions". 

It's such a seemingly small thing, but things like this happen all the time: one is given the test of trusting "God" (through His earthly agents, the Men of God), and if one questions their judgment at all, not only is their faith, obedience, and testimony called into serious question, but their influence on weaker brethren is flung at them so as to inflict the most guilt-ridden pain as possible, especially if one is "in a position of leadership" ("What the preacher's family does in moderation, the congregation will do in excess.").

I desperately wanted our side to be Absolutely Correct. I needed to believe that all my choices made in an effort to follow God were right, so, well...I submitted my own judgment to that of The Powers That Be, and toed the party line, to my shame. This has been my pattern of proving my faith to God, since I was young. I figured if I was submissive enough, maybe He'd get around to filling my cruze of oil.

I hate that I was ever like that.

Now that I am reading these books (just finished The Prisoner of Azkaban), I am absolutely pissed off.  The powers that rule my former world, in their efforts to control every little damn thing, inflict needless fear and unfounded judgement, have deprived a lot of people a pretty freaking good story, just because they can, one that champions the type of good character of which they are supposed to be examples. I hate to think what else this stupid fear has deprived people of.

It doesn't have to be like that.  As that second letter points out, fundamentalism depends upon a manipulation of the idea of being a "slave to Christ."  Whatever that strange and disturbing phrase might mean, if it means sacrificing the mind on the altar of faith, it's just a way of saying that you aren't allowed to think.

It's customary in bad Christian apologetics to say that "rationalism is also a faith," and this is partly true, but not in the way that it's meant.  Rationalism is a faith in a supposition: that causes lead regularly to effects.  But the nice thing about it is that it invites a conversation into observable causes and effects that require less faith than attention to detail.  Fundamenalism invites the conversation about "What God hath said" to cease and desist, and only so can one prove one's faith.

And there's no getting around it.  That's a tyranny to the mind.  And I think there's a certain amount of the shadow of hate that will stir itself in a mind that's made by God to be free.

Comments

[Legume]

Wow! Of course, you know my opinion about both Christmas (I enjoyed Christmas and Christians: a Defense as well) and Harry Potter. I echo the sentiments of the second letter. Shame on me! Shame on us! Never again!

How hard it is to read what the woman in the first letter had to withstand hearing year after year about Christmas pagan traditions, that we now use in our celebrations. Shamefully, this year, I found myself wanting to expound on the many traditions we have stolen from the pagans in our seemingly Christian celebrations, if only to combat that hatred towards saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," and the all round sentiment that Christmas is originally about Jesus, so how dare we give Santa such precedence. Yes, I have repented, and relented, but it is all rather disconcerting. What God has cleansed and all that, but, why does that mean we have to be rude about the whole thing? It saddens me. We could use it as such an opportunity to love, and yet we get so acidic about our "rights" - like it matters. It only succeeds in pissing people off!

You are right, tyranny of mind never works. I think that tyranny of mind is spurred on by fear, and there are times when that fear is hard to deny. I find it fascinating that we say we believe in the power of a living God, and yet, we conduct our lives in a way that speaks to the fear that He is not powerful at all. It is perplexing.

[Daisy]

Shoot: Bob Jones is a godless compromising liberal in many fundie circles today. The isolationism of some streams of fundamentalism has reached levels that rival Jim Jones' Guyana. Nearly all music is evil, most literature, Democrats, professional sports (funded by The Demon Liquor), and beaches (bastions of porn) are all forbidden to the Fundie-in-Good-Standing. Even today, on facebook, there was an example of this willful isolation. I read the following status update with profound sadness: "Had to remove a friend for potty mouth-so sad."