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RELIGION FILM HUMOUR POETRY CONTACT _________________________________________________
Excerpt from Everyone has stories to live by. To a Native American, the overarching narrative of her life might be the story of how the white man invaded her country and subjugated her people. On the flipside of that coin, the patriotic Republican’s narrative is the story of a glorious nation, a tale of how heroic men championed freedom and built a country founded on God. These are stories that underpin everything we do and think; they are lenses through which we view and interpret the world. For over ten years I was part of a particular story, and it was one that shaped my entire way of relating to the world. It was the story of fundamentalist Christianity, and it went something like this: God created the world; man was created good; Adam and Eve sinned; man was corrupted, and came under God’s condemnation, specifically the judgment of eternal punishment; God sent Jesus to take the punishment for us; if we become Christians, we will go to heaven and be saved from hell. It was a story about good versus evil, God versus Satan, and the world was the battleground between the two. When you become a fundamentalist Christian, typically by being “born again,” you become a part of that story. A distant and alien story about God and a group of people thousands of years ago becomes the story of how you yourself, two millennia after the cross, crossed over onto the right path and became destined for heaven. You will join a community where the big story will be told over and over again, whether explicitly or implicitly, in the songs you sing, the sermons you hear, the conversations you have, the language you use and the rituals in which you participate. Present-day fundamentalists may well see themselves as part of a story about how society is getting worse and worse as standards decline and the ungodly have their wicked way, a story about how people have overcome by resisting this decline and how you too can overcome. Within the big story are smaller stories, whether hypothetical or attached to actual events, about how accepting this, that or the other is the beginning of the slippery slope into heresy and apostasy. As in all good stories, there are heroes and villains. The world is divided up unambiguously into Believers and Unbelievers, the Saved and the Unsaved. The Believers are faithful, Bible-believing, valiant defenders of eternal truth, heavenbound. Unbelievers are godless, blinded, hellbound. There are the Liberals, pretend Christians, attackers of the truth, rebellious against God, unbelievers masquerading as true believers. Everyone falls into one category or another. Fundamentalism presents a very black-and-white world. And if all this looks like a caricature of fundamentalism, perhaps that’s because the fundamentalist worldview is a caricature of the world itself? Leaving Fundamentalism, ed. Elijah Dann will be published December 2007 by Wilfred Laurier Univeristy Press
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