The Psychology of Fundamentalism
The following is rather lengthy. Essentially this is essay is 22 pages, so I took out key quotes that I thought formed the substance of the observations and summarized them before posting the quotes. If you wish to read the entire 22 page essay, as I suggest, the click on the link at the bottom.
When we truly investigate fundamentalism, we begin to see that it is much less of a spirituality and more so a complex that arises out of some intense psychological needs. Excerpts from the following essay makes some very interesting observations in regards to fundamentalism and some key psychological concepts:
The first component of fundamentalism is often referred to in psychology as “splittingâ€Â, it is a basic and primitive psychological technique devised by the psyche to actually avoid the pain of introspection. Typically this occurs in the form of splitting good from evil, creating a polarized view of the world. The fundamentalist must see the world in terms of “black and whiteâ€Â, for this over simplistic vision alone serves the purpose of preserving a basic psychological state. Essentially a fundamentalist fears the complexity of life and can leave no room for ambiguity or shades of gray. Literalism then, is the most basic step for securing this mindset, for the complexities of life become organized into what God says is good and what God says is evil. One needs only to look to the Bible to discern what to do. One need not think for oneself, for the fundamentalist fears such a terrifying onus, so it is left to “Godâ€Â:
Literalism is the linchpin of fundamentalism; the literalization, if you will, of the founding psychological need. For an absolute certitude that can be established at the level of facts that will admit of no ambiguity or interpretation. But to eliminate ambiguity and confusion one must attack its source. Figurative language. That is the danger that must be avoided at all costs because in place of the literal figurative language introduces the play of meaning. The need to sustain complex connections at the level of thought (not fact) through the evolution of mental abilities that are necessarily connected with developing all the metaphoric resources of language. The literal in contrast puts an end to thought. It offers the mind a way to shut down, to reify itself. It thereby exorcises the greatest fear: interpretation and its inevitable result, the conflict of interpretations and with it the terror of being forever bereft of dogmatic certitudes. A metaphor is the lighting flash of an intelligence that sees, as Aristotle asserts, connections that can only be sustained by a thought that thereby liberates itself from the immediate. Literalism is the attempt to arrest all of this before it takes hold. It's innermost necessity is the resistance to metaphor. For with metaphor one enters a world that has the power to unravel the literal mind. Literalism is the first line of defense of a mind that wants to put itself to sleep. A sensibility that like Nietzsche's last man can only blink in blank incomprehension at anything that can't be immediately understood. It is the great protection against a world teeming with complexities. Literalism offers a way out, a way to keep the mind fixed and fixated at its first condition. The way: the refusal to comprehend anything that exceeds the limits of the simple declarative sentence. Two reductions thereby feed on one another: the world is reduced to facts and simples; the mind reduced to a permanently blank slate. Literalism reduces reading and interpretation to the Cratylean dream: one need only point to the appropriate passage and "Pouf" all doubt and ambiguity about what one should think, believe, or desire on a given situation vanishes. One need no longer wrack one's brain or one's heart or live in the terror that the world exceeds one's grasp. When approached literally the Book of necessity takes on a number of other characteristics. Everything in it must be factual and nothing outside the book can contradict those facts. The very possibility of scientific investigation is sacrificed a priori to the need to proclaim the text's inerrancy. Every word of it must be the unalterable and unchanging word of God, which of course can contain no contradictions. One of the ironies of fundamentalist reading is the rather considerable constraints it places on the deity. He proclaims and what he says remains so forever, beyond growth, development, change, revision. Whatever abomination of sex hatred one unearths from Leviticus must remain gospel today. The Book cannot be read progressively or retroactively, despite Christ's repeated claims to cancel the old law. An eye for an eye remains true for all time however out of keeping with the law of charity. After all, "It's in the Bible." That repeated assertion expresses the essence and fundamental paralysis of the literal mind.
Literalism is a cardinal necessity of the fundamentalist because it guarantees the primary psychological need. For a certitude that in its simplicity puts an end to all doubt, even to the possibility of doubt. That is what one must have and once attained what nothing can be permitted to alter. The literal meaning of words one need only point to for that meaning to be established must be imposed on the world without a blink of hesitation, a shadow of doubt, and when necessary beyond any appeal to the simplest claims of our humanity. Two examples. Perhaps the most chilling moment in a recent CNN special on fundamentalism occurs at the end of an interview with a young girl-between 8 and 10-who was saved at an earlier age (3) and is now so firm in every article of the faith that she is no longer in need of her parents or teachers. Earlier when the mother was asked if she'd ever let the children watch South Park the young girl chimed in: "I wouldn't want to watch a program like that." The interview ends with this question: "what happens to those who don't believe?" Like a trumpet call, in the blinking of an eye, even less, without batting an eyelash the child answers: "They go to hell" What made this statement so chilling was the absence of the slightest sign of doubt or pity.
II Conversion:
The fundamentalist can not take responsibility for himself. What he fears most is psychoanalysis, for by its nature, is introspective and reveals what is within which he seeks so desperately to avoid. In the conversion experience he magically purges himself of everything that might be dark or unwanted in his psyche, all of which he can attribute to his “fallen nature†or the powers of Satan. He surrenders it all to Jesus and is magically bestowed with a “new selfâ€Â. This is the splitting, everything is seen in terms of absolutes. His old self was the devil, his new self God. The world is seen with a stark simplicity, divided in to saved and condemned. In the moment that he was delivered to Jesus he was delivered from his own psyche, a kind of psychological nihilism.
This category is best approached through narrative. Fundamentalism is in love with a single and common story it never tires of telling. This story is the key to the nature of the transformation it celebrates and the absolute split that transformation produces. A subject finds itself lost in a world of sin, prey to all the evils that have taken control of one's life. A despair seizes the soul. One is powerless to deal with one's problems or heal oneself because there is nothing within the self that one can draw on to make that project possible. The inner world is a foul and pestilent congregation of sin and sinfulness. And there's no way out. One has hit rock bottom and (so the story goes when it's told best) teeters on the brink of suicide. And then in darkest night one lets Him into one's life. And all is transformed. Changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. Before one was a sinner doing the bidding of Satan. Now one is saved and does the work of the Lord. The old self is extinguished. Utterly. One has achieved a new identity, a oneness with Christ that persists as long as one follows one condition: one must let him take over one's life. Totally. All decisions are now in Jesus' hands. He tells one what to do and one's fealty to his plan must be absolute. There can be no questioning, no doubt. For that would be the sign of only one thing-the voice of Satan and with it the danger of slipping back into those ways of being that one has, through one's conversion, put an end to forever. The person or self one once was is no more so complete is the power of conversion. A psyche has been delivered from itself. And it's all so simple finally, a matter of delivering oneself into His will, of following His plan as set forth in the Book and of letting nothing be within oneself but the voice of Jesus spreading peace and love throughout one's being.
Magically one attains a totally new psyche, cleansed, pristine, and impermeable. One has, in fact, attained a totally new self-reference. The self is a function of one's total identification with Jesus. Consciousness is bathed in his presence. It has become the scene in which his love expresses itself in the beatific smile that fills ones face whenever one thinks of one's redemption, the tears that flood one's blessed cheeks, the saccharine tone that raises the voice to an eerie self-hypnotizing pitch whenever one finds another opportunity to express the joyous emotions that one must pump up at every opportunity in order to keep up the hyperconsciousness required to sustain the assurance of one's redemption. The whole process is a monument to the power of magical thinking to blow away inner reality, and as such a further sign of the primitive nature of the psychological mechanisms on which conversion depends.
Such for the fundamentalist is what it means to have a self. To live an abstract allegory. Devil before, god after. With the self dissolved under the force of the one agent or the other. And never the twain shall meet. Except as absolute antagonists. One could say that conversion transforms the self, but it would be more appropriate to say that it annihilates it. That is in fact its function. For salvation to occur the self is precisely that which must be rendered powerless then transcended through a transformation that can only come from without. That transformation accordingly produces a split that is absolute and must be maintained at all costs. For it is what the psyche depends on to deliver it from everything disruptive and unstable in itself. Even if at times one finds oneself again a sinner, that sinfulness is all the work of the Big Other, Satan. Salvation is deliverance and such is the fundamentalist despair over the self that deliverance must be total. Conversion is thus the antithesis of what happens in an authentic psychoanalysis. A contrast between the two will bring out what happens within the psyche when it embraces conversion. The key to an authentic analysis is the assumption of full responsibility for who one is through the attainment of a concrete and intimate knowledge of one's psyche, of the unconscious desires and conflicts that have structured the history of one's life
The answer to the problem of the psyche lies in the maximization of the problem. Self-analysis is based on the recognition that there is no deliverance from desire and inner conflict. Satan, in contrast, is the blank check that puts an end to that process before it can begin. Consider the contrast between two statements. " I was a lustful man and a fornicator who worshipped the Beast within me." "I was a man who hated women and used sex to injure them psychologically in order to feed the emotional conflicts of my relationship with my mother." The difference between the two statements is enormous. The first obliterates the need for further description, exorcising the possibility of self-knowledge and genuine responsibility. The second is but the overture to the painful problem of taking on responsibility for every word of it.
Here, then, is the real truth of conversion. Fear and hatred of the psyche and a desperate desire to be rid of it. The psyche is that which one must find a way to escape and then to deny. Any sign of its continued presence after conversion produces panic anxiety. That is why for conversion to work one must maintain a carefully limited subjectivity given over to the self-hypnotic iteration of all the signs or behaviors one maintains in order to reassure oneself of one's salvation. The presence of anything else within fills the fundamentalist with terror and loathing and the need for a fresh exorcism. The psyche is the problem in fundamentalism not because it's sinful but because it's exacting. Sustaining a relationship with it requires the constant opening of oneself to the suffering of truths not about the devil but about oneself; not about evil but about the actual things one has done to other's harm, which is the bottomless discovery that psychoanalysis inflicts on us as the price of remaining human.
III Evangelism
However, because one has buried all that is unwanted into the deepest depths of the psyche and attributed it to Satan and the fall of man, it still brews there threatening to boil over and return. This is why the fundamentalist must madly repeat the story of his conversion, he must consistently keep up this façade, maintain the “splitâ€Â. This is where the psychological concept of projecting comes into play. Evangelism is necessary for the survival of the new self that the fundamentalist has constructed, he must simultaneously project every “evil†within himself upon the world, feeding a consuming hatred of this “sinful worldâ€Â, while also attempting to convert others to the same psychological process. The very existence of different perspectives threatens the certainty that preserves his state, so he must affirm himself through others.
Evangelicalism is the manic activity whereby the split in the psyche that conversion creates is projected onto the world. Thereby one confirms the identity one has attained through a fresh exorcism of the one that conversion vanquished. Evangelicism offers the fundamentalist the only way to sustain the reborn self: by trying to recreate the experience of one's conversion in others in order to reenact an unending exorcism. In the other one locates the split off self one once was now placed totally outside oneself. It becomes the fantasm of what must be the condition of one's auditors, of those who, whether they know it or not, are lost, wallowing in error and sin, their minds awash in the torrents of secularism, dumb to the clarity that comes from the Words one now speaks to bring them enlightenment, could they but hear.
Through evangelicalism one engages in the repetition compulsion that has become one's innermost necessity. The only way to prevent a return of the projections is through their continued projection. By locating them outside oneself and waging an "attack" on that externalization one is delivered from the fear of what can no longer be within. Everything bad is now outside oneself and one must do everything to keep it there. One can share with one's auditor the confession in the abstract that one is a "sinner" too but the discussion better shift quickly to the evils of the world: to homosexuals and abortion and the entertainment industry and best of all the imperiled state of a nation bereft of "moral values." One is well tuned then. The manic drive has been unlocked and sweeps to a revenge upon anything that can be even remotely associated with one's former self; for one has entered a dream state and readies desire for wrathful discharge upon a world drenched in sin. Evangelicalism offers the psyche a chance to be cleansed again of everything that may still fester deep within somewhere, longing to break out.
The paper continues to explore the idea of the apocalypse and how the end of the world, encompassing the destruction and obliteration of all that the fundamentalist hates, is a necessary extension of the disorder.
http://www.counterpunch.org/davis01082005.html
Fundamentalism is directly opposed the psychology that is inherent in the teachings of Christ. I will post later concerning what psychological implications Christ's teachings had, and how they nuture a healthy psychological state.
