Fundamental Misconceptions

“You drink a lot of whisky, don’t you?”

My friend Jesse* laughed aloud. “No.” (*name has been changed)

“But you want some whisky right now, right? You wish you had some whisky?”

Jesse laughed even harder. “I’ve never even had whisky.”

That statement left the Muslim man perplexed. Never had whisky? “But you’re American, right?” His attempts at converting this “immoral Christian American” weren’t going quite as he planned.

Funny as the experience was for Jesse, it made one thing very clear: the perception of Americans, and Christians, among Muslims in Pakistan is far from the truth. The problem is, the only Americans they have ever “met” were those seen on TV, as portrayed by our Hollywood: the men sleep around, get drunk every other night. The women are manipulative and seductive. And because they have been taught all their life, in the Middle East, that America is a Christian nation, this must be Christianity.

Sure, many Americans are like that, and many of them might even call themselves Christian, but that sliver of the population in no way represents the whole of those who carry the Christian label. To those of us who are Christian, we know this without giving it any second thought. And we will either get a great laugh upon seeing the misconception, or will be quite offended.

I am a fundamentalist. A “fundie,” as we are sometimes so affectionately called. That means I believe crazy things, like every word of the Bible is literally true. Jonah was not swallowed by a whale because a whale is a mammal, not a “fish” as the Bible says. We need to storm the gates of Jerusalem with the Gospel, rebuild the temple, get the Jews to reinstitute sacrifices, because that will usher in the Tribulation, and the Rapture and the Return of Christ. Right? That’s what fundamentalism is all about, isn’t it?

Wrong.

Absolutely, unequivocally wrong.

Yet I am amazed that nobody gets this. I have never met a non-fundamentalist who really understands what fundamentalism is. Not one. At least not one with whom the topic has ever come up.

But I have seen fundamentalism misrepresented countless times. In fact, every single instance I can think of that a non-fundamentalist brought up the topic, he or she had severe misconceptions about the group.

Sure, those crazy beliefs I mentioned about Jonah and Jerusalem are held by some. But I assure you, those who believe so are vast minority of fundamentalists, and a highly ignorant sampling of the fundamentalist population at that.

Not to make this a theology lesson, but fundamentalism is derived from a group of Christians around the turn of the twentieth century who saw an increasing tendency toward liberalism in churches in America, and wanted to bring the church back to a handful of the “fundamentals” of the Christian faith. Among these are “inerrancy,” or a “literal interpretation” of the Bible (a sorely misunderstood set of phrases), the bodily resurrection of Christ, the vicarious and atoning character of his death, and his physical second coming to earth.

I believe all of these doctrines are absolutely essential to Christianity. Hands down, the most important truths.

The problem is that a small subsection of fundamentals – the extreme right – have taken this and run with it to bizarre extremes… And those are the few fundamentals that get themselves seen. Sadly, this leaves the rest of America as clueless about fundamentalism as the Pakistani Muslim mentioned above concerning Christianity and America.

The truth of the matter is, as humans, we generalize what we see into categories: things, experiences, people. I would even venture to say it is essential to our sanity. When we meet a new person, our brain needs some hook of past experience to hang the mental thought of that person onto. He is male. She is a soccer player. This person is a musician. We speculate things about the people we meet based on past experiences. It saves us immense amounts of time and mental energy trying to figure everything out as if for the first time, because so often, these generalizations work. We can skip over learning the same information about this new person that we have already learned before, and move on to really begin to get to know more about them than just their category or categories.

Like I said, this is essential. However, it does not stop there. It is also essential to our development as humans to learn to refine this process, to learn to take note when the generalizations we hold are somewhat skewed. Or incorrect altogether. We must not only learn to categorize things to help us through life, we must also learn when to let those categorizations break down, when to redefine them, when to change the way we view the world, and the things and people in the world around us.

I know I’ve been misunderstood because I’ve been thrown into somebody’s category of one sort or another. Computer guy. Musician. Writer. Christian. Fundamentalist. And I know I’ve done the same thing to others, countless times. That’s only human. It is essential to how we function. But it is also essential that we learn how and when to get past that, to take the step beyond our assumptions and really get to know one another.

Lord, let that be my endeavor.