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    Psychology: The Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism
    Posted on Monday, January 10 @ 16:35:36 UTC by Rasta

    Psychology By Walter A. Davis
    "I know you're a Christian, but who are you a Christian against."

    --Kenneth Burke
    In Apocalypse, a patient study of Christian fundamentalism based on extensive interviews over a five year period with members of apocalyptic communities Charles Strozier identifies four basic beliefs as fundamental to Christian fundamentalism. (1) Inerrancy or biblical literalism, the belief that every word of the Bible is to be taken literally as the word of God; (2) conversion or the experience of being reborn in Christ; (3) evangelicalism or the duty of the saved to spread the gospel; and (4) Apocalypticism or Endism, the belief that The Book of Revelations describes the events that must come to pass for God's plan to be fulfilled. [1] Revelations thus becomes an object of longing as well as the key to understanding contemporary history, to reading the news of the day and keeping a handle on an otherwise overwhelming world. Each of these categories, Strozier adds, must be understood not doctrinally but psychologically. What follows attempts to constitute such an understanding by analyzing each category as the progression of a disorder that finds the end it seeks in Apocalyptic destructiveness.

    Before undertaking that examination a note on method. My goal is not to number the streaks of the tulip with respect to Christian fundamentalism but to get to the essence of the thing by offering a psychoanalytic version of the method Hegel formulated in the Phenomenology of Mind. My effort will be to describe the inner structure of the psyche implied by fundamentalist beliefs by examining those beliefs in terms of the psychological needs they fulfill. The examination of each belief will reveal its function in an evolving "logic" that traces the sequence of internal operations required for the fundamentalist psyche to achieve the form required to resolve the conflicts that define its inner world. The difference between my method and Hegel's is this: Hegel's effort was to describe the sequence of rational self-mediations required for the attainment of absolute knowledge. Mine is to record the sequence of psychological transformations that must take place for another kind of certainty to be achieved: one in which, as we'll see, thanatos and not reason attains an absolute status, freed of anything within that would oppose it. In effect, my goal is to offer fundamentalists a self-knowledge they cannot have since it is precisely the function of the belief structure we shall examine to render it unconscious and all the more powerful and certain of itself by virtue of that fact. What after all is religion but a desire displacing itself into dogmas all the better to assure the flock that what they desire is writ into the nature of things?

    Who does the structure we'll examine describe? George W. Bush and some of those closest to him? The 42% or 51% of those Americans who now call themselves fundamentalists? The 80 or 90% of practicing Christians, the over 1 billion viewers worldwide, who found Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ a singularly compelling expression of their faith and who are thus already far more fundamentalist in their hearts than they realize? The power of any religious belief system derives from how deeply it taps into collective needs and discontents. In this regard we may already be living in a fundamentalist Zeitgeist with the collective Amerikan psyche now defined, even among those who have never (or seldom) seen the inside of a church, by the emotional needs and principles of operation that find their most seductive realization in fundamentalism. We may in fact find the same "faith" informing a project that initially appears to have nothing to do with fundamentalism--global capitalism.

    Though he does not share their beliefs Strozier often comments on the charity and gentleness of his interviewees seeing in that a sign that we should always temper any criticism of fundamentalism by acknowledging the good things it does for people, many of whom would be lost or miserable without it. Be that as it may, in terms of the psyche a far different condition might maintain with a pronounced dissonance between the sincerity of the surface and the depths where something quite different has taken hold of the psyche. Moreover, in the psychoanalysis of a belief system the primary concern must be not with the sheep but with the Grand Inquisitors. Or, to put it in psychoanalytic terms, with those who fashion the Super-ego which is the agency essential to the hold that any religion assumes over its followers. Our concern, in short, must be with fundamentalism not as a pathetic phenomena, a halfway house for drug addicts and a panacea for those who find in it the infantalization they seek, but for those who have fashioned in it what Nietzsche would call (though with horror) a strong valuation, an attempt to take up the fundamental problems of the psyche and fashion a will to power out of one's resentment by developing a faith that will make one strong and righteous in that resentment, like Falwell, smug in its smug certitudes like Dubya, confident in the right to rule over those it reduces to the status of sheep, dumb and blissful in their blind obedience to the will that is collectively imposed on them.

    Religion remains of course the one thing we are enjoined to treat with kid gloves as if this is the one area of life where criticism and a rhetoric that tries to energize the force of criticism is verboten. Violating this rule is also the quickest way to lose what current statistics indicate will be the 93% of one's audience who say they believe in God. It is thus important that I indicate up front that this is not a contract I can honor. Like Freud, I think it can be demonstrated that religion is a collective neurosis. In fact one implication of the following examination is that Freud didn't go far enough. But let me reformulate this hypothesis in a more convivial spirit. Let's bracket the whole question of whether religion has an object. On second thought, let me concede it, the utter ontological truth of all the basic beliefs, ever each one. Only then perhaps can we focus on the question that constitutes the inherent and lasting fascination of religion. Not what people believe, but why. The consideration of religion as a psychological phenomenon-and as such perhaps the one that offers the deepest insight into the nature of the psyche and its needs.

    I. Literalism

    "I don't do nuance."

    --Dubya

    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. (Fundamentalists, ironically, are the true positivists.) 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. Let me offer one example. "There is no God and Mary is his mother." In this great aphorism Santayana asserts an ontological impossibility and a psychological necessity. I once tried it out on some fundamentalist friends. They were at first puzzled by the unintelligibility of the statement then amazed that Santayana and I were so dumb we couldn't see the contradiction. Finally the light went on, almost in chorus, the literalist deconstruction of the statement: "If he wasn't a God how could she be a mother?" All attempts to suggest that the statement wasn't meant to be taken literally only produced further confusion then frustration then anger. Santayana's statement made no sense precisely because it was a koan, a paradox intended to produce reflection, even introspection. It was there I suggested that one would find the key to its meaning; not in the assertion that its meaningless constituted evidence that Santayana was perverse or mentally unbalanced. We were, of course, talking at irretrievable cross-purposes with no way to bridge the gulf between us. Which was, of course, the point of the exercise.

    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.

    Fundamentalism feeds on and fosters this reduction of the mind to the conditions of the immediate. For in fundamentalism literalism is raised to the status of a categorical imperative. It is the law that assures deliverance from all confusion. There is a single text, the Holy Bible. It contains clear, simple direct messages-proclamations-that establish the Truth once and for all. All of life's questions and contingencies are resolved by statements that are beyond change and interpretation. 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. The Book's unequivocal meaning and Life are adequated to one another in a relationship of stark and simple imposition. You see God has a plan for us and unlike secularists and post-structuralists He speaks in clear and unmistakable terms.

    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. The idea of reading the Book along the pop-Hegelian lines pursued by Jack Miles as the story of how as He develops God changes his mind, softening his prematurely hardened heart is anathema. God's role is set by the limitations of the literal "imagination." His job is to lay down the law, once and for all, and in no uncertain terms; to be that super-ego who operates by the only logic that literalism permits-binary opposition. All conflicts and confusions must be resolved into a sharp, simple, and comprehensive opposition between Good and Evil. Else comes again the fit of contingency and ambiguity. Binarism is the realization in logic of the literalist attitude toward language. The reduction of language to the declarative statement is matched in binarism by a logic that turns everything into an abstract allegory.

    The most interesting reach of literalism comes, however, in the interpretation of the prophetic writings, especially Revelations. Here confronting what even it must see as image and metaphor, literalism performs the only operation that makes sense to it. The metaphoric is literalized. Armageddon must takes place on the plain of Jezreel near the ancient military fortification of Megiddo (35 miles southeast of Haifa), even though this patch of land "is not tomb enough and continent to hide the slain." Gorbachev must be the Beast (how else account for that red swath on his forehead); Saddam Hussein must be the Antichrist-or Arafat or Bill Clinton. Anything and everything that happens in the Middle East must be scanned as a sign that we are indeed moving toward the Tribulation. When he speaks prophetically God is playing a little game with us, to activate what in fundamentalism passes as the exercise of imagination. To make sense of the text requires the precise matching of its ornate and expressionist images to persons, places and events which are thereby assigned the only meaning they can have. Mapped onto history the Bible offers us an absolute certitude about history, thereby vanquishing the greatest contingency. In dealing with the Middle East , for example, we need not confuse ourselves with the messy details of political history or develop a nuanced appreciation of Islam. Such things only breed confusion. All we have to do is literally match a prophecy to a contingency and Voila! we have attained literal certitude or, what amounts to the same thing, the fantasmatic imposition upon reality of what we want to believe. [2]

    In all these operations sustaining a literal interpretation of the Bible is a desperate necessity. Once let go of that and the Book slips away into the hands of those who eventually will find anything in it-liberation theology, Bonhoeffer's religionless Christianity, a searing message of love-since they will be guided in their reading by nothing but the attempt to sustain a heart in conflict with itself using a book to pry open the deepest and most conflicted registers of its own interiority. Who can tell, perhaps this approach could even lead to the discovery that the Book hates the simple minded; that it is indeed Kafkaesque in offering parables and prophecies that only deepen our burden by demanding an intelligence equal to the complexity of the human heart.

    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. If there is an innocence left here it lies in the possibility that, unlike her parents, the child has not yet started to feast on images of the damned. She is however already in league with where fundamentalism will take her because she's attained the correct posture: the assumption of an absolute certitude in which there is and can be no conflict of the heart with what it is told to believe, no possibility of wondering about a God who is capable of the titanic condemnation she's just asserted as an assured article of faith. Nor of course is there the possibility of the only legitimate choice such a "truth" would demand-the rejection of such a God. 2 +2=5. Whatever one is told the Book says becomes the truth. One then clutches it to one's bosom with literal precision, locking in step to its every command, Kadavergehorsamkeit. My second example comes from poor Mel Gibson who judging from a TV interview accepts with apparent indifference the belief that barring conversion to Catholicism his own wife (mother of his 7 Catholic children) will suffer eternal damnation. Such is the literal nature of his faith and the ability of that literalism to seal off everything else in him so that we need not fear that Gibson will ever find himself in the place of Milton's Adam who choose death because he couldn't bear the thought of an eternity apart from the woman he loves. Literalism protects the heart from everything, even its own deepest urgings.

    There is something terrifying in our first example; something appalling in our second. Together they reveal the emotion in which the literalist passion is grounded. Hatred--of all complexities; of anything that can't be reduced to the simplicity of absolute dogmas and the need to impose that hatred upon the world in a totalizing way. It is sometimes alleged that fundamentalists are just like the rest of us, confused by the world and seeking something to hang onto as a portal in the storm. This view is invalidated by the nature of the answers that the fundamentalist finds: answers that annihilate the problem, turn the desire for knowledge into a farce, and make of confusion the motive for self-infantalization. (By their answers ye shall know them.) Literalism is the way, but hatred is the through line. That is why fundamentalist certitude always becomes rectitude with the Bible mined for all the things one can label abomination. Thereby a sensibility that wants to have nothing to do with the world takes revenge upon it. On the surface literalism looks like a characteristic of fundamentalism free of psychological motives; on investigation it reveals itself as one of the clearest signs of the psychological need in which the entire project is grounded. Literalism is the first realization of the psychological root of fundamentalism: a fear and hatred of the contingencies that constitute being in the world. That is the first threat that must be vanquished. The second is found at a more intimate register.

    II. Conversion
    "But if a man is to become not merely legally but morally a good manthis cannot be brought about through gradual reformationbut must be effected through a revolution in the man's dispositionHe can become a new man only by a kind of rebirth, as it were a new creation."

    --Immanuel Kant
    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.

    The most striking thing about this narrative is the transparent nature of the psychological defense mechanism from which it derives and the rigidity with which it employs that mechanism. Splitting. Which as Freud and Klein show is the most primitive mechanism of defense employed by a psyche terrified of its inner world. The conversion story raises that mechanism to the status of a theological pathos. Though the story depends on recounting how sinful one's life once was(often in great even "loving" detail) the psychological meaning of conversion lies in its power to wipe all of that away. 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.

    The power of conversion to produce a saved self makes the Catholic confessional the operation of rank amateurs. There through forgiveness one gets temporary relief from sins that in all likelihood both priest and penitent know one will commit again. One gets a momentarily cleansed psyche but not a lasting transformation. Through conversion, however, one achieves an absolutely new beginning. One's life is divided in half. Split between B.C. and A.D. Everything one once was is washed away. Everything one now is is its antithesis. Such was the miracle that came upon Dubya by the end of his walk along the beach with Billy Graham. The man George W. Bush was is no more. It was merely the stuff the dream of conversion was built on and now has vanished leaving not a rack behind. Dubya is reborn to the very depths of his being. And everything that follows becomes a pure expression of the new self he now has. Thanks to Jesus. For that's the key both to conversion and its aftermath. One has finally little or nothing to do with the transformation. Agency is the Lord's. He enters one's psyche and performs precisely what the psyche could not do for itself. Moreover, the new agency that results from conversion is also his. All that one now does derives from his Will. One has become the medium through which the Diety achieves its purpose. One's own will finally has nothing to do with it. One is but the servant of his Will, doing what he tells one to do as He makes that purpose known. That's also why errror is inconceivable, when when asked Dubya is unable to discover any mistake he's made as President. And of course that must be so in service to a deeper exigency. It is His will that put one in the position of the most powerful man in the world and He must have done so because He had something special in mind.

    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. Attaining such knowledge entails three steps. (1) Recognition that one is the author of one's condition; not Satan, not the parents, not demon rum in its effects on a pre-existing physiological condition. The state of one's psyche in its bankruptcy is the function and fruition of a desire. That is why, as Freud said, one must listen to the details of one's illness-not the appeal of remote and general causes-because it is in those details that much that is of value to one's future life must be derived. (2) Through the second recognition: that the problem of the psyche is not to extinguish desire but to reclaim it by freeing oneself from the self-defeating ways one has lied to oneself about it. To do that one must see that the trauma or traumatic event that has produced a crisis or breakdown in the psyche is the fulfillment of its own plan for itself. It is the thing one has brought upon oneself, like Oedipus, through one's effort to avoid it. As such it is what first puts one in the position to know oneself. As a being defined by conflicts that cannot be transcended but must be sustained. The task is not to escape them but to enter into them in the right way. Conflict is and remains the reality ­and burden-of the psyche. (3) Which begets the third recognition. The recognition that one never escapes one's psyche nor achieves some form of ego-identity that guarantees a stability outside or beyond conflict. Change requires a radically different discipline-and change is what psychoanalysis is all about. What it teaches is that the possibility of change involves taking on a total responsibility for one's psyche. One does so not by fleeing one's conflicts but by deepening one's engagement in them. Life is a process of becoming responsible for oneself by deepening one's awareness of all that within oneself for which one must assume responsibility. A genuine analysis turns on the assumption of a tragic agency; it "ends" when that agency has become the relationship that one lives to oneself. One is not freed from one's disorder but delivered over to it. The depth of the interrogation one continues to pursue about one's psyche becomes the basis of the agon one continues to have with oneself. That is the ethic that psychoanalysis makes possible, an ethic of existential change that is terminated only with one's death. To exist is to be in the difficulty of what it is to be a subject burdened with itself.

    Working through (Durcharbeit), the most important part of any analysis, is essentially an education in the process of assuming a tragic relationship to oneself. It is the art of learning to sustain tragic emotions-the kind we're told we must avoid or shed as quickly as possible since all they can do is made us sad-as the emotions that put the subject in touch with its inner world. Depressive melancholy must become, for example, what Keats saw it as: "the wakeful anguish of the soul." The route to self-knowledge is a progressive deepening of a knowledge of one's disorder through the suffering of it. This possibility depends on a single circumstance: the concrete and bitter immersion in the particulars of one's life and one's responsibility for those particulars. No satanic agency caused one's condition and no messianic agency will come to blow it away. One must know and accept the concrete causes in oneself that have shaped the self-lacerating history of one's heart. One is not delivered from it; one is delivered over into it. There is only one source of inner strength and it is found in a full acceptance of relating to oneself in depth by sustaining the suffering that relationship entails. 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.

    Conversion is the flight from that action. The psyche is safely delivered into the hands of abstraction. One was under Satan's power when one did all those terrible things. That's how He works. He invades a soul like a thief in the night and under his power we do all sorts of things that are against our nature. But once we let Jesus in we are cleansed. Born again. All before was the work of an otherness that invaded us. It is now burnt and purged away. We can of course feel remorse but at the same time those we harmed should know it was not really our doing. The cause is not in ourselves but in the virus that invaded our soul.

    Psychoanalysis delivers the subject over to itself as the one relationship that cannot be transcended. Conversion delivers the subject from itself. What one was is not the depth of a disorder one must plumb concretely in the full horror of all one must come to know about oneself as author. It is rather all that one can blow away through one's conversion! Such is the power and pleasure of splitting as a mechanism of defense. In the absolute reliance on that mechanism fundamentalism renders up its secret.

    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. Such a tragic discipline can have no meaning for the fundamentalist except as the condition one must be delivered from. How perfect then to find a way to be done with the whole thing, to shed one's former life the way a snake sheds its skin and then be reborn in the conviction that one has consigned it to the past. But the only way to sustain that state is by living the life of a subjectivity under surveillance needing and giving itself constant reassurance that it is saved by pumping up all the positive emotions (and happy talk) that witness one's oneness with the Lord while guarding against the expression of any of the old, negative emotions that would suggest the opposite. Expressing the emotions of the saved has become an obsessional necessity. One thing alone is needful. Giving the proof at all times-especially to oneself-that one is on God's side.

    To be saved is to enter a condition in which one only has "positive" emotions, Christian emotions, which are always played "over the top" because the primary purpose of the performance is to engage in an ongoing act of self-hypnosis. In keeping with a duty that cannot be shirked: one must become the walking embodiment of one's simplest version of the love that God has for you since any other kind of love would be exacting whereas this one offers the bliss of self-infantalization. That's the source of the monotonous sameness of the fundamentalist congregation, the aping and mimicking of one another; the identical smile of mindless bliss, the tearful displays, the saccharine tone in the prosletyizing voice, the need to constantly proclaim how wonderful it feels to be saved and to bear witness to that fact by turning every possible occasion into a chance to inflict a bevy of dimensionless emotions and sentiments on others as if being a Christian amounted to being a walking Hallmark card. In all this one labors under a manic necessity. But it isn't enough. That mania must find a practice that will offer lasting reassurance by enabling one to repeat (as it were) the process and content of one's conversion.

    III. Evangelicalism
    "This is deadly work."

    --Clov in Samuel Beckett's Endgame
    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. This is the root cause of the frustration that quickly comes if we make the mistake of bidding entry when the fundamentalist knocks on the door. We offer discourse in vain to those who are seized by a necessity. It's not just the repeated literal citation of the Bible as absolute truth ("do you know that satan was once an angel close to God; that's why he's so powerful") or the repeated refrain that puts an end to all discussion ("well I believe the Bible and the Bible says"); or the inability to hear anything we say except as a sign that we've not yet grasped the truth that's galling. It's the recognition that despite the charitable demeanor, evangelical activity is based on a total lack of respect for the minds of those they are trying to convert.

    That lack of respect is, however, necessary. Anything less would be a confession of doubt. Which would make the other a threat when they can only be one thing: an image of what one was prior to conversion, of what the world in its unregenerate condition represents. Namely, the place where one projects all that conversion supposedly removed from the psyche. 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. This is an operation fundamentalism shares with its most famous offshoot-Alcoholics Anonymous. Though splitting and projection produce denial, one is always in danger of slipping. One needs a ritual to reestablish who one is by again exorcising what one was. What the meeting does for the alcoholic proselytizing does for the fundamentalist.

    It should now be evident that what looks at first like the least important of the four characteristics of fundamentalism fulfills perhaps the deepest psychological necessity. Without this activity the fundamentalist psyche would implode. The obsessional need to preach the gospel, to find a way as soon as possible to let every stranger one meets know that one is a Christian, born again, are practices that derive not from a lack of social skills but from a manic necessity. For the saved there is and can be nothing but the story of their salvation. It is the master narrative to which all lives must conform, the tale one must tell as often and ardently as the Ancient Mariner tells his. Though for antithetical reasons. The Mariner tells his tale to relieve an inner pain by injecting it into the consciousness of listeners who will be existentially individuated by the tale. Evangelists tell theirs to reassure themselves about their "identity" by trying to compel others to participate in it. Structurally and psychologically, however, both tellers labor under the same necessity. Repetition as the attempt to retain an identity in order to flee something else-in the Mariner's case a suicidal depression; in the fundamentalist perhaps the same thing -- that is of necessity buried deep in the unconscious. One piece of evidence in support of this hypothesis: without the chance to engage in evangelical activity the fundamentalist psyche sinks into a state of empty boredom.

    Thus the lassitude of Dubya before 9-11 and the hectic messianic energy that has defined him since. 9-11 gave him what he needed-the chance to transform a stalled Presidency by adopting an evangelical stance toward the entire world. Preemptive unilateralism is not just a political credo. It's an evangelical article of faith. The world must of necessity be divided into Good and Evil. And one must bring that message to the world in the same way the fundamentalist visits the doorstep of the unconverted. If those one addresses-the United Nations, other countries, members of the Republican party-aren't converted to the Word that can only be a sign of their error. Or worse. As Ashcroft never lost an opportunity to remind us, their complicity with the enemy. The whole world is either with us or against us. And nothing anyone says can have any other meaning. We cannot let our message be altered by doubts or fears. The fundamentalist mind, closed off from discourse by its own certitude can only project itself upon the global stage in the way demanded by inner psychological necessity. Manic activity under the guise of certainty as the proof that one has triumphed over all inner conflicts. And thus the beckoning of a new necessity. The need to extend the opposition between Good and Evil as far as possible-from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Axis of Evil to the 60 nations identified as supporters of terror-in the assurance that God has chosen one for a mission not just to convert the World but to wage war on whatever one labels evil, the only certainty being that one will always find fresh targets because doing so has now become the projective necessity of a mania that drives toward the omnipotence it seeks by pushing the war on terror toward an ultimate realization. Moreover, whatever one must do in waging this war is justified without the possibility of any appeal to conscience. Thus another doctrinal innovation that distinguishes Dubya from all previous Presidents: the assertion of the right for a first strike use of nuclear weapons and with it the developments now under way to create a host of new "tactical" nuclear weapons. To deliver the world from the spectre of nuclear war we must ready ourselves to wage a nuclear war on the world. (Paranoia thus projects the possibility of an omnipotence beyond MAD as policy.) And so we should all indeed be trembling in our boots to know the mind-set that now has its finger on the nuclear trigger. Happiness is a warm gun.

    The war on terror has many meanings, not the least of which the blank check to disseminate an Orwellian fear whenever the Adminstration desires. Perhaps its deepest meaning, however, is to mark the founding moment in which politics in Amerika becomes inseparable from the projection of a religious ideology. 9-11 told Dubya that the time was ripe for a mission that the Diety elected him to perform. A seamless transition thus offers itself to us, from an evangelical presidency to the fourth characteristic of fundamentalism, the one that, as we'll see, informs and completes the others taking us to the heart of the disorder, the innermost necessity that hallows all its dreams.

    Continue...


     
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