Most public criticism of religious fundamentalism seem to come from the secular left. But I'd like to hear more such criticism from the millions of moderate (and modern) religious people out there. (Three cheers for the United Church of Christ's anti-fundamentalist ad campaign: God is still speaking.)
Are moderate religious people afraid to distance themselves from fundamentalists? Are they afraid that they would be cutting themselves off from their core? I hope not. No religion with a living, spiritual heart has anything to gain from fundamentalism, and in fact has much to lose.
Religious fundamentalism is often seen as an attack on 'Godless' secularism. But it is also an attempt to deny people a living, evolving relationship with their spirituality. Fundamentalism relies on old doctrines rather than active engagement. Afraid of growth and change, and above all, modernity, fundamentalism is a regressive attempt to replace living experience with willful ignorance. But if our faith rests on fear, then where's the faith? God has nothing to fear from modernity. God is certainly not afraid of our doubts, our questions, or our evolution. God has nothing to fear, period.
For a religion to maintain its essential life, a connection to its essence, it must encourage the spiritual development of its members. This means an active, ongoing process of renewal, which demands that we think for ourselves and ask the hard questions. All religious people struggle with doctrine, from time to time, wondering when to accept and when to reject certain aspects of their tradition. That struggle, I believe, is part of being religious. We must preserve and protect this right to question, and preserve and protect other people’s right to question too. We must object to fundamentalism for the sake of religion itself.
Ironically, secular people may not be the most effective critics of religious fundamentalism, for many have some fundamentalist tendencies of their own. If religious fundamentalism can be considered an absolute faith based on fear, secular fundamentalism can be considered an absolute fear of faith. Hence we have a conflict that seems to be about 'faith', on one hand, and 'no faith', on the other. A more interesting conflict might be the one between between progressive religion and regressive religion, or between living faith and dying faith.
The most effective critique of fundamentalism may thus come from religious people themselves, who realize that that what is essential in their faiths will survive change, and indeed benefit from it.
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