Fundamentalism Does Not Exist: Liberal Christianity as an alternative to the Evangelical right.

This is Matthew5’s first post here on his own. Please welcome him as he is part of the Coalition for a Democratic America group blog.~Dusty

“A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love to one another.”

John 13:34-35

“Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. That is the first and great commandment. The second is like unto it,Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Matthew 22:35-40

For all intents and purposes Fundamentalism is a figment of the far right’s imagination. The Evangelical Right routinely uses the Bible as a weapon against its opponents when it seeks to score political points, but if the truth is to be known the fact of the matter is that no one can be a fundamentalist. Oh I’ll admit that the Evangelical Right and the Millenialists, and other right wing factions like to use the Bible and they routinely display an attitude that seems to say “we’re so much better than everyone else because we believe in a literal interpretation of the Entire Bible (especially the bigoted, hateful, repressive, and violent portions therein). But what the far right fails to realize is that the very argument they use to promote their supposed superiority, is in fact an argument against Fundamentalism in general. The key word is the word interpretation, although I would argue simultaneously that it is also a matter of emphasis. In a book as long and and self-contradictory as The Bible, one must by necessity pick and choose those parts that one finds inspirational. Thus liberals and conservatives, while both revere (or at least claim to revere) The Bible find themselves believing and promoting very different interpretations of the holy text. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that one interpretation is equal to the other. I have looked at the Evangelical Right and to be perfectly frank, I don’t like what I have seen.

If you ask me a Christian should be drawing his or her inspiration from the Gospel of Christ, with less emphasis placed on the Old Testament, the writings of Paul, and the Book of Revelations. In too many ways the Evangelical Right has begun to resemble a secular fascist movement with the name of Jesus and a plethora of nationalism connected to to make their repressive agenda more palatable to an unsuspecting public. My blogging partners (PraetorOne, Donatra, BibleBelted, and SweetPea) have written about this topic before, but I shall attempt to recap some of their main points. The death penalty; Anti-Antisemitism; the delegation of women to second class citizenship, that the position of mere breeders; the virulent hatred of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals; rampant nationalism intertwined with right wing religion; the triumph of pageantry and symbolism over reason and common sense: those are all traits that the Evangelical Right shares with fascist forms of government. In other words, Right Wing Evangelical Movements, including the one here in the United States in 2008, have more in common with Mussolini’s Fascist movement of the 1920s and thirties than they do with either truly compassionate (read liberal) Christianity and what the Founding Fathers intended in the United States Constitution. Their primary objective is to replace both, liberal Christianity and the Constitution with their violent, rapacious interpretation of the holy text.

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