Issue date: 5/22/03 Section: Opinion

A couple years ago, when I was living in Clementon, New Jersey, a profoundly disturbing thing happened. I was off from work, trying to relax in my living room, when someone knocked at the front door. Even though the neighborhood had been going steadily downhill -- at one point the police conducted a drug sting operation not far from my house -- being the trusting soul that I am, I still opened the door to perfect strangers, albeit during the day. When I got up to open the door, I expected to see a kid selling snickers for his softball team, or a woman conducting a survey.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

What I saw instead was an emaciated blonde man clutching a Bible. I will never forget the crazed look in his black, probing eyes. He handed me a pamphlet to read, and when I declined, he asked me: "Are you sure you're going to heaven on Sunday?" He spoke in a perfect monotone, with no emotion to speak of. This individual then turned around and walked away.

The only meaning I could dig out of his cryptic statement was that I would not get to heaven if I did not follow his type of Christianity. Thinking back on this incident, I now realize that it was not an isolated one. When I was a sophomore at Penn, I happened to overhear a rather bizarre conversation in the dining hall one night. I was sitting next to an Asian woman and her male friend. The male student asked his friend why she changed her mind about going to graduate school.

"I think the Lord has chosen a different path for me," the woman said. "He doesn't want me to go to graduate school." Judging by the size of the bags under her eyes, she probably had not slept in days. If there is a God, I thought, I seriously doubt that he cares about your career choices. I had known that there were fanatical Christians, but I had never dreamed that they could have won converts at a bastion of the intellect like Penn.

After encountering a Christianity that bore no resemblance to the Catholicism I was reared in, I decided to look into this. What I learned was a relatively new religious phenomenon -- fundamentalist Christianity -- was spreading throughout America and the Third World like wildfire. And anyone who supports pluralism, religious tolerance or science education should be concerned about this development. Christian fundamentalism, like its Islamic counterpart, is the blatant refusal to compromise with the modern world. Fundamentalists take a literal interpretation of the Bible, and reject any scholarship or theory that does not conform to the Bible, for they believe that scripture is the "inerrant" word of God and should not be questioned. This explains their opposition to the teaching of evolution in the school system. If they did not think the creation account in Genesis literally happened, no objection would be raised against evolution.

Fundamentalism differs from mainstream Christianity in other ways. In Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity, Bruce Bawer asserts that fundamentalism -- which he terms "legalism" -- diverges from "modernist" or mainline Protestantism in almost every aspect. Bawer argues that legalism emphasizes adherence to doctrine over love of one's neighbor; with modernism it is the opposite. While modernists regard Satan as a metaphor for the potential for human evil, legalists believe Satan is a supernatural being that exists out in the world, ready to deceive and tempt people who are not "saved" by the "true" Christianity.

This is the reason many legalists believe that people who profess other faiths can become instruments of Satan, and therefore deem other religions "demonic." Televangelist Pat Robertson was quoted as saying that Islam is a "Christian heresy" and that Hinduism "has as its origin, demonic power." The Evangelical preacher Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, declared that Islam is "a very evil and wicked religion."

Of course, if you decide beforehand that someone else's religion is "evil" just because it is different from your faith, you will not be very inclined to engage in a religious dialogue with adherents of other faiths. This is the danger posed by a rigid, doctrinaire fundamentalism that stresses that there is only one path to salvation.

Another pitfall of Christian fundamentalism is the disconcerting tendency to regard the intellect as suspect, a potential tool for Satan. In Holy Terror, Flo Conway and Jim Seigelman report that some people who join fundamentalist Christian groups are told to get rid of every book in the house except the Bible. Perhaps that is why fundamentalism has spread so rapidly in places like Latin America and Africa, where education is substandard and superstition runs rampant.

Hopefully, there will be more of a dialogue between the major religions in the future and fundamentalism of every variety -- Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, and Hindu -- will wither away under the lens of reason, and the power of love.

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