The Messianic Legacy by Michael Baigent

Author:Michael Baigent [Baigent, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B00CA88GC4
Goodreads: 19188314
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-05-30T21:00:00+00:00

The Fundamentalists

Among the questionable alternatives to religion embraced by contemporary society — among the various ersatz religions, that is — one must include the kind of fundamentalist teaching promulgated by certain sects and churches in Britain, in South Africa and in the United States. Like all ersatz religions, these teachings eschew responsibility for everything a genuine religion entails and offer something else — something potentially dangerous — as a palliative.

Granted, Christianity, like most other religions, has in the past had its fanatics, espousing over-simplified dicta and prohibitions, more intent on coercing conformity from their neighbours than on crystallising their own sense of meaning. Indeed, it could well be argued that the social, cultural and political history of religion, at least in the West, is to some degree the history of such imposition. Judaism, at various points in the past, and Islam, in the past and today as well, are equally guilty. But it is disturbing to see the same phenomenon developing in the West on as broad a scale as that which obtains today. It has taken us a great many centuries, and cost a great deal of bloodshed, to learn a measure of tolerance. That we can feel shame at such aberrations as the Inquisition, or the witch-trials of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation, attests to some genuine advance in learning, some genuine education on the level where education truly matters — in values and attitudes. It bodes ill when such gains are threatened by a return to fundamentalist simplicities — by a return, in other words, to the use of religion as mere tribal myth.

In the past, fundamentalist simplicity has often served as a refuge for oppressed minorities, or even for an occupied country. Sometimes it has assumed a violent and aggressive form — that of Polish Catholicism, for example, when, during the nineteenth century, Poland lay prostate beneath the alien yoke of Lutheran Germany and Orthodox Russia. Sometimes, and probably more often, it has provided a consolation for the helpless, counselling resignation while at the same time proffering hope. In this capacity, fundamentalist teaching performed a genuinely therapeutic role for nineteenth-century Jewish ghettos in Eastern Europe, and for black communities in the American South.

What is occurring today, however, is the embrace of fundamentalist simplicities not by an oppressed and persecuted minority, but by some of the wealthiest, most comfortable, most powerful and, theoretically, best educated people in the world. This in effect nullifies much of what Western culture has so painstakingly learned — not only in purely academic spheres such as biblical study and evolutionary theory, but also in the more relevant and ultimately more important spheres of humanity and tolerance. Not since the excesses of seventeenth-century Puritanism — Cromwell’s Protectorate in Britain, the witch-trials in New England as well as in Western Europe — has religious fanaticism and bigotry been allied in the West with wealth and power on so large a scale. Except, of course, for the Third Reich.

Modern fundamentalism in America

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