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SnowStar Axial Magazine

AXIAL is the SnowStar Institute's magazine. It is published three times a year: fall, winter, and spring, and features articles from leading scholars and thinkers, submissions from SnowStar members, and news about developments and goals of the SnowStar Institute of Religion.

AXIAL Winter, 2003
Brandon Scott
©SnowStar Institute of Religion.

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Father Knows Best: Where is Fundamentalism Taking Us?

(Brandon Scott)

Introduction

The demise of religion has often been predicted and yet it not only persists but at times its least enlightened forms prosper. Today Fundamentalism is spreading throughout the world. Accounting for this flourishing is a pressing and important task. Between 1910 and 1915 a group of evangelical churchmen circulated a series of pamphlets entitled "The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth." These pamphlets defended traditional Christianity, or at least their version of it—evangelical revivalist Christianity—from the onslaught of German biblical criticism and Darwinism.

In 1920 Curtis Lee Laws, a Baptist journalist, apparently coined the term "Fundamentalism" because he found "conservative" too weak. So he called for those who were ready "to do battle royal for the Fundamentals" (Ammerman, 2). One of the chief claims of the Fundamentals Pamphlets is the literal interpretation of the Bible. Every study of Fundamentalism since has underlined this. But literalism is a sham claim. There is no such thing a literal interpretation of the Bible. No one literally thinks Jesus is a shepherd or that God is our father. Jesus did not keep sheep and God did not have intercourse with my mother. Although it sounds crude to make this point, yet sometimes it is important to point out the obvious. These important statements can be true only metaphorically, as is the case with all significant religious statements.

A fictitious e-mail making the rounds on the internet, addressed to Dr. Laura, who provides "biblical advice" to TV and radio audiences, makes the anti-literalist point.

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from you, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

1. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. How should I deal with this?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery as it suggests in Exodus 2l:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
4. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may buy slaves from the nations that are around us. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 10:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don’t agree. Can you settle this?
7. Leviticus 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am con­fident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.

This fictitious email makes the point that so-called literalists are very selective. The literalist claim is truly bogus and therefore not helpful in finding out what Fundamentalism really is. Yet the temptation to selective literalism lurks behind many guises. Liberals also fall victim to this temptation. For example, I sometimes wonder if a kind of fundamentalism doesn't lay behind some of the interest in the quest for the historical Jesus. If you can show that Jesus supports a certain position, e.g., Jesus supports women–takes liberalizing stands towards them in comparison with his society in general–then by implication Jesus supports modern feminist concerns. What drives this type of argument is an implied Christology, a type of fundamentalism that insists on the priority of Jesus as a claim on the believer. This type of argumentation demonstrates that all believers, from the most conservative to most liberal are susceptible to the fundamentalist instinct.

Fundamentalism Defined

Martin Marty and Scott Appleby's Fundamentalism Project is the most ambitious, scholarly and cross-disciplinary study of Fundamentalism ever undertaken. Between 1991-1995 the project brought together scholars from around the world, produced five volumes and over 8,000 pages. This treasure trove provides a rich resource. Yet it did not stop the debate about what Fundamental is, but only added fuel to the fire. Rather than attempting a definition that would cover all versions of Fundamentalism, the Fundamentalism Project identified 18 characteristics of Fundamentalism. The characteristics were grouped into three categories, five ideological characteristics, and four organization characteristics. (For a succinct summary of the characteristics and a good overview of other studies of Fundamentalism see http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/fund.html).

The very number of characteristics indicates the problem with the definition of Fundamentalism. What interests me about Fundamentalism is not so much what fundamentalists say about themselves, or the study of Fundamentalism itself, but their relation to wider cultural trends. After the Enlightenment religion has become disembedded and we have treated it as a separate, unrelated phenomenon, and this is a mistake. So I want to pursue Fundamentalism as a symptom of wider cultural issues. To pursue this interest the last two of the family resemblances from Marty and Appleby's study draw my interest.

They [fundamentalist movements] are led by males. They envy modernist cultural hegemony and try to overturn the distribution of power. These two characteristics, while not specifically religious, open onto Fundamentalism's relation to the wider cultural situation and this interface, I suggest, offers an avenue forward. These two characteristics are reactions to one of the chief characteristics of modernism, the liberation of women. The two are intimately tied together and I will attempt to expose the reason for this.

While Fundamentalism may have started out as an American phenomenon, it has spread throughout the world as traditional societies have confronted modernism. Thus we find Jewish fundamentalists, Islamic fundamentalists, and Hindu fundamentalists. Furthermore, these religious fundamentalists have developed strong political power. In India the ruling Bharatya Janata Party (BJP) is a Hindu fundamentalist party that builds its power on the rejection of Islam and plays on Hindu fears of former Islamic conquerors. In Israel and the United States, both governments have the strong backing of fundamentalist groups, with important members of the government being identified as fundamentalist. Iran, with its religious revolution, was only the edge of a fundamentalist wave that threatens much of the world.

The emergence of these political/religious fundamentalist groups shows not only their power, but more importantly their appeal to vast numbers of people. Their appeal transcends those who agree with their religious positions. They are drawing on deep themes and values in their respective cultures. Some have even characterized non-religious movements as fundamentalist. The financier George Soros refers to "market fundamentalists," by which he means those who see only free market and private enterprise solutions to all economic issues. For him market fundamentalism is the chief driving force of American economics, which the United States then evangelizes thorough the world. Soros sees a parallel between the attitudes of religious fundamentalists and market fundamentalists. Non-religious uses of the term may be problematic, but they indicate that there are semantic and cultural connections between the two phenomena that point to some underlying system that enables us to intuitively identify them as similar.

Metaphorical Thinking

We need to focus on Fundamentalism not as an independent religious movement but as a part of a larger cultural system. Fundamentalism is responding to and is the product of a larger cultural system. My thesis is that fundamentalism derives its power form its common sense view of the world.

The field of cognitive linguistics offers a model to think about this issue. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in a number of books beginning with Metaphors We Live By and most recently Philosophy in the Flesh have argued that much of our thinking, as well as behavior and perception, derive from unconscious metaphors. These metaphors are not unconscious in the Freudian sense of repressed, but unconscious in the sense that we are normally unaware of them. Because we are unaware of them, they appear to be common sense. But these metaphors function as a conceptual system. For Lakoff and Johnson, "a conceptual metaphor is a conventional way of conceptualizing one domain of experience in terms of another, often unconsciously" (Lakoff, 2002:4).

Perhaps an example will help. In English we employ the metaphorical system ARGUMENT IS WAR. So the system of language we use to talk about WAR can be used to understand the more abstract experience of ARGUMENT. So for example:

Your claims are indefensible.
You attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms were right on target.
I've never won an argument with her. You disagree?
OK, shoot!
If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out.
He shot down all my argument.
He defended his position. (Lakoff, 1980:4.)

Did you ever try to have a discussion, while the other person is arguing? What is the difference? The level of hostility. This underscores Lakoff and Johnson's point. "The concept is metaphorically structured, the activity is metaphorically structured, and, consequently, the language is metaphorically structured" (1980:5). In the case of ARGUMENT IS WAR, war as a metaphorical system is not just a way conceptualizing argument, but it is also effects our experience and behavior. We experience an argument as war and we behave as though we were at war.

Father Makes the Rules

Lakoff has taken this analysis of metaphorical systems even further to analyze Moral Politics, How Liberals and Conservatives Think. He constructs a metaphorical system that makes the positions of conservatives and liberals appear as common sense to themselves and no sense or nonsense to each other. Because these are metaphorical systems they are normally unconscious to their users. Lakoff labels the conservative metaphorical system as Strict Father. "Father makes or enforces the rules" summarizes the system. The metaphor of the strict father explains how conservatives develop ethical values. It has a number of entailments – ways the metaphor plays out – that explain their moral positions. The way these entailments are elaborated produces a coherent system. The first and most important entailment is "THERE ARE RULES." Fundamental to a conservative moral system is the existence of rules—there must be rules. Furthermore the rules must be absolute, otherwise they will be difficult to enforce. Thus conservatives see relativism as immoral, since if rules are not absolute but relative, rules cease. Chaos results. Any challenge to the rules inevitably leads to chaos and immorality. It is always a slippery slope. Rules represent the natural order—this is the way things are! Such an accent on rules leads to either/or thinking, a Manichean worldview. You're either with us or against us. Since there are rules, those who break the rules must be punished. Finally, in such a black and white model, the world is a dangerous place. It really is chaotic and needs rules and discipline to avoid degenerating into chaos.

Liberals often wonder how conservatives can claim to be pro-life and pro-death penalty. What to a liberal is inconsistent, to a conservative is common sense. There is a rule: thou shall not kill. Those who break it must be punished or the rule will be ineffective. So those who perform an abortion are murderers and should be punished and those who murder someone should be subject to the death penalty. Liberal common sense, of course, sees the matter quite differently. It does no good to argue because we are arguing about common sense, something that is obviously right and needs no argument. To argue admits that it is not common sense and therefore not obvious and so we throw slogans at each other. In the strict father model the father makes the rules or enforces them. The father aspect has several important entailments. This model is inherently patriarchal or hierarchical. The moral order legitimates a natural order of leadership. Human beings are subject to God, women to men, children to parents, nature to human beings. Always in the system there is an order of subjection, the so-called great chain of being.

To enforce the system the father must be strong and encourage self-discipline in his children. Because the world is dangerous, one must have the self-discipline to make one's way through the world. The father must defend the system above all else. Since this is the moral order, the natural order, the father has a moral duty to defend the system. Those who attack the system disrupt the moral order, must be fought and condemned as evil. Feminists easily become the bête noire of the system.

I have greatly simplified Lakoff's analysis, simplified to the point of caricature. Yet even this sketch indicates how this mostly unconscious metaphorical scheme underlies and makes sense of conservative moral stances. Also to be fair to Lakoff, he develops a similar model for liberal moral stances under the heading of Nurturing Parent. But since the interest in this essay is Fundamentalism, the liberal metaphorical system will have to await another day. Lakoff and Johnson argue that human experience supports a metaphorical system. For example the orientation metaphor UP IS GOOD is based the physical experience that when we are standing up, standing tall, we feel good. Whereas when depressed, we feel down and frequently, literally go to bed.

For Lakoff the Strict Father model follows on the experience of raising children or more precisely, it derives from male experience. Traditional families usually make use of two models, one male and one female. The male model is the strict father and the female is the nurturing mother. The roles are blended in a traditional family. Lakoff maintains that many modern families still blend these two roles, with the father laying down the rules and the mother nurturing. This explains why white males in the USA overwhelming vote Republican and women Democratic.

Americans use family as a metaphorical system to structure their politics? According to Lakoff the connection is the common understanding that the NATION IS A FAMILY. So the metaphorical logic becomes, 'what is true of a family, is true of a nation.' The problem in the USA is we have two competing models for family structure—strict father and nurturing parent. A historical note: Lakoff is little interested in history, but of course this transferring of the family model to the nation is not unique to USA. Augustus set himself as father of his country

Church as Family

Not only does our political system exploit the family, but churches can and do see themselves as a family. They follow either a strict father or nurturing parent model, dividing American Christianity into two competing models. Or in the so-called mainline churches, they split internally over this two different models. Christianity encourages the use of the church as a family model with its insistence that God is our father. Naturally we metaphorically apply our experience of family to church life and theology. The author of the Pastorals made a similar move. Following upon Paul's notion of the community as a family, the Pastorals used the metaphor of the Roman family to reconstruct the church into a hierarchical family with the bishop as the pater familias.

Fundamentalism is a religious version of the Strict Father metaphorical system. Recognizing that the Strict Father model undergirds Fundamentalism has several gains. It explains Fundamentalism's continuing viability. Since it builds on a fundamental human experience of family life and child raising, it appears as common sense. It makes clear the reason for Fundamentalism's ability to build political alliances with other conservatives. Since Fundamentalism is a version of Strict Father model, it has much in common with other conservative groups who likewise adopt a version of Strict Father. All these groups are unified in seeing the Nurturing Parent as threatening or immoral. Liberals tend to dismiss Fundamentalism as naïve or backwards. But this is problematic. The power of a metaphorical system derives from three important factors:

1. Based on experience. In the case of Fundamentalism, it appeals to the prevailing social experience of male dominance.
2. Its common sense appeal.
3. The mostly unconscious metaphorical system.

These three elements give the system a sense of conviction that makes it very difficult to subvert. Its unconscious nature makes alternatives invisible or difficult to see. For the most part it is not amenable to rational argument. Pointing out inconsistencies in the system is usually only pointing out inconsistencies from another point of view or another common sense.

Modernity

Modernity, in the form of scientific and historical explanations of human behavior, has not been kind to the Strict Father model which returns the favor by seeing modernity not just as a threat, but as immoral. The accent on rules and hierarchical order runs counter to trends in play since the Enlightenment. Darwinism attacks not only the literal character of Genesis, but undoes the natural order in which humans are superior to animals. Evolution has steadily reduced the distance between us and other animals and in fact all life. The naturalness of the hierarchical order is pivotal to Strict Father. The social sciences, sociology and psychology, have continued this trend of undoing the so-called natural order. Child psychology, for example, has thoroughly disabused the wisdom of spare the rod and spoil the child. A simple glance at fundamentalist child rearing manuals indicates the importance of physical punishment in the Strict Father model (eg., Dobson). Conservatives have sought to thwart laws requiring the reporting of child abuse, which laws they see as undermining corporal punishment of children.

This steady drumbeat of modernity has led a significant number of males to adopt the Nurturing Parent model, not only politically, but religiously and within their own families. Thus increasingly within modern societies we have a number of people whose experience on which a metaphorical system is based is different from the tradition and thus the radical cleavage of modern American society. We have two groups whose basic experience on which they base their unconscious, common sense metaphorical reasoning is radically different.

Frequently Darwinism is cast as the spark that set off Fundamentalism, especially given the galvanizing effect of the Scopes Monkey Trial in the 1920s. But I would like to suggest that the real breakdown begins with abolitionist movement. The debate over slavery was really the first widespread political and religious movement that exposed the vulnerability of traditional ethics and the natural order. Aristotle in his Politics argued that the universal natural law, the order of the universe, had set man over woman, father over children, and master over slave. The household with its ruling order was the order of nature, based fundamentally for Aristotle on the division between the soul and the body. Just as the soul was meant to rule over body, so the master was to rule over the slave, etc.

But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature? There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule. . . . And it is clear that the rule of the soul over the body, and of the mind and the rational element over the passionate, is natural and expedient. . . . Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind. . . .It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right (Aristotle, Poetics,1.5).

Not only had Aristotle argued that slavery followed the natural order, but the Bible clearly approves of slavery. To my knowledge, St. Patrick was the only person to oppose slavery until the rise of the anti-slavery movement. John Wesley in a tract widely published under his name argued against slavery without reference to the Bible, because obviously he knew that the biblical evidence was against him (Wesley, "Thoughts upon Slavery;" see also Outler, 85-6, for publication history of Wesley's tract).

The strong religious dimensions on both sides in the abolitionist debate masked how problematic the slavery debate was for those supporting biblical inerrancy. Copernicus (1543) displaced the earth at the center, Darwin (1859) displaced man at the center, but the anti-slavery movement demonstrated that the Bible could be and was wrong about a major ethical issue. The implication was clear—its commandments are not absolute nor is it inerrant.

Aristotle had tied the naturalness of slavery to the subordination of women. It is no accident that women often led the anti-slavery movement and that agitation for the emancipation of women followed in the wake of the anti-slavery movement. The arguments mounted to keep women in their place, bear a striking resemblance to those employed against slavery. It's against nature, a woman's place is in the home, it's against the Bible.

Now gays are coming out of the closet and once again the same arguments are mounted. We are living through a clash of worldviews about reality itself that has endured since at least Copernicus and Galileo (1623). What is at stake is the natural order of reality, the great chain of being, whether rules are absolute. As Aristotle illustrates, the natural order is hierarchical and common sense. The Bible represents this same point of view. Fundamentalism is a religious version of this argument that uses the literal interpretation and inerrancy of scripture as a rhetorical argument to insist on the revealed and indisputable nature of rules and the order of reality. Males are naturally superior to females, fathers to children, and, oh, let's forget about Aristotle and the Bible on slavery. With the master and slave argument set aside and the equality of women gaining ground all the time, understandably the defense has shifted to family values, homosexuality, fathers over children and environmentalism, humans over nature.

Theological Response

Fundamentalism partakes of a larger cultural movement and most of us, if we are honest with ourselves, at times find ourselves on both sides. Yet we must resist Fundamentalism and its other cultural manifestations because they are wrong and dangerous. Fundamentalism supports an oppressive social arrangement that is not supported by what we know scientifically about the world. The Strict Father Model, while having much but not all of tradition on its side, dangerously distorts reality. It produces dysfunctional families and depressed women. In thinking theologically about our response to Fundamentalism we need to remember:

The underlying Strict Father Model;
The common sense character of Fundamentalism;
Its appeal to experience;
Its mostly unconscious operation.

In sketching out a response I am going to take a very narrow focus and hope it suggests something more than what it really is. That is, I'm going to hope the part suggests a whole.

Lord's Prayer

Since I have argued that the Strict Father model underlies Fundamentalism, I will turn my attention to Father in the New Testament. Despite the common assumption that God as Father is a very common title in the New Testament, actually the term only dominates two Gospels, Matthew and John. Throughout the rest of the New Testament it occurs, but remains more in line with typical Jewish usage. The identification of Jesus as Son clearly drives the notion of God as Father and this combined with the first and fourth Gospels preeminent place in the history of Christianity has led Christians to view God almost exclusively in terms of father. But the meaning of father is not obvious. What kind of father is God? A strict father enforcing the laws? Or a nurturing parent caring for his/her children?

The Lord's Prayer is a good example of this problem. I will set aside whether Jesus ever taught his followers this prayer, and instead view it as a history of traditions problem. Two versions of the prayer occur in the New Testament, one in Matthew and the other in Luke. Most maintain the Lucan version is Q. While in general the version in Matthew is more elaborate than the one in Q, the Q version is not without clear editorial elaboration, especially in the phrase dealing with sins/debts.

For our purposes the most important phrase is the invocation: Our Father who art in Heaven The simple "Father" of the Q text probably represents "Abba." The use is clearly reflected in Paul. "For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, 'Abba! Father!'" (Romans 8:15). And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba!Father!” (Galatians 4:6) Mark in his construction of Jesus' test in Gethsemane places the baptismal formula on Jesus' lips: "He said, 'Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want'"(Mark 14:36) Abba very probably represents Jesus' normal usage for speaking of God. Joachim Jeremias' contention that this usage was unique to Jesus is not accurate (1964) nor is his suggestion that it should be translated as "Daddy" (Barr, 1988). The simplicity of Q's "Father" when compared with Matthew's "Our Father who Art in Heaven" clearly represents an intimate, less hierarchical view of God. Furthermore the shift from Q to Matthew indicates that at a very early period some followers of Jesus grew uncomfortable with the intimacy of Father/Abba.

Let me rephrase this contrast in a more controversial fashion. Father/Abba represents a more intimate, more maternal view of God. If this seems too much, I would point out that in the parable of the Prodigal Sons the father behaves in ways in which a first century culture would have identified as maternal. For example, at the parable's conclusion he addresses his elder son as teknon—a noun that in the vocative is the mother's term for the child. "Child (or baby), you are always with me" (Lk 15:31; See Scott, 81-2). Matthew's move towards a very male view and away from the female, from egalitarian to hierarchical, is replicated over and over again in the New Testament.Traditional Ending

Most liturgical uses of the Lord's prayer, especially in Protestant congregations, utilize the ending of Textus Receptus: "For thine is kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever." This ending, which is ancient but not original (Metzger, 16), runs directly contrary to prayer's original intention. The original abba prayer is a peasant's plea for the removal of crushing debt, an overwhelming problem in Galilee; a cry for food to fill an empty stomach; and finally, not to be put to the test. The prayer loudly proclaims that present conditions contradict "thine is kingdom, the power, and the glory." Only the spiritualizing of the prayer anesthetizes us to this inherent contradiction. The prayer clearly points out that Abba's kingdom is at risk because we are crushed by debt, starving and afraid of the test. Finally, recall the title by which we normally refer to this prayer, "The Lord's Prayer." Kurios, lord, is a title from the imperial cult. By referring to this prayer as "The Lord's Prayer" we shift it as far as possible from Jesus' peasant's prayer.

This detour through Jesus' Peasant's Prayer indicates the depth of the issues in reclaiming the New Testament and by extension Christianity from Fundamentalism. In both theology and liturgy we are fighting what appears to be a common sense understanding of the tradition and unless we carefully avoid language that does not overly invoke the strict father and associated imperial images, we will forever fall victim to fundamentalist temptations. This demands a new strategy for theology and liturgy.

Theology

Theology needs new guidelines. I am proposing initially three basic strategies. Theology can never begin by assuming that it already has the answer. Any theology that does not begin with radical doubt is basically dishonest. The tradition does not provide automatic answers for now, and not always for then! Too often modern theologians already know the answer and are only attempting to reconcile what they already know (the tradition) to a new situation. Had I been alive at the time of the Council of Nicaea I would have been a believer in the Creed and the Ptolemaic universe. The latter is no longer true, so why should the former?

Science is not the enemy but the guide and handmaiden for theology. I hesitate to use "handmaiden" since that implies a subordination of science to theology. Rather theology cannot preempt science and must follow in its lead. Theology is a second level discipline; science is a primary discipline. We cannot claim as theologically true what flies in the face of scientific evidence. Science and theology do not deal with different and separate realms. That only gives into a platonic temptation. Both science and theology are examining reality, the same reality.

The evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson has remarked, "The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology" (Consilience, 286). Evolution may yet offer new and fruitful ways to think about the place of religion and theology. Evolutionary biologists are becoming interested in religion and we should become interested in evolutionary biology. A very fruitful dialogue might result as indicated by David Sloan Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society and in a more popular but very thoughtful vein, Why God Won't Go Away, by Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquill, and Vince Rause. We must be willing to begin by saying that we do not already know the answer.

We should insist upon the reality of our experience, but be suspicious of the language the tradition has used to justify and express it. The experience of the transcendent is too widespread and of too long a duration in human experience to doubt the reality of the experience. The experience of the transcendent is not illusionary but real. While we as individuals can be delusional, as a species evolution has designed us to have accurate knowledge of environment and to be able to distinguish between the real and illusionary. Otherwise, the tiger would have eaten us a long time ago. Insisting on the reality of the experience is not to say what it is an experience of. We should insist on the reality of experience and then tread with care.

Liturgy

Jesus' Peasant's Prayer suggests that we need to pay attention not only to theology, the effort to understand analytically our religious experience, but also liturgy, the way we live out publicly our religious life. In an gesture towards symmetry, I suggest three guidelines for liturgy. We need to mine the language of family without conflating it with empire. Many family metaphors are problematic in and of themselves, but the issues are compounded when we employ imperial metaphors to interpret family metaphors. Too much of our liturgical life and hymnody derive from the metaphors of empire. It is time to abandon them and develop democratic metaphors. We no longer need hymns to Jesus our Lord and Master, but to Jesus our lover and friend.

Liturgy is not about the past, but life in the present. Liturgy should not recreate a dream world, a romanticized past, but symbolize and ritualize current struggles and life. We need rituals for cancer, 12 step programs, and divorce. We need to celebrate and mourn. And we need liturgy that celebrates the scientific worldview as our own. We need a new asceticism that helps people become silent and turn off the media roar that drowns out our true life. The challenge today to religious experience is not science, but Disney. The media has created a fantasy that wants to surround our every waking moment. We must learn to turn it off, if we are going to hear the still quite voice.

Conclusion

This is a very small response for a very large issue. At the risk of sounding overly apocalyptic, we are battling for the soul of Western tradition and perhaps for the fate of humanity. Evolution will be little concerned if our species ceases to exist, but consciousness will have gone out the universe and that will be a loss. Richard Rorty, the American pragmatist philosopher, once remarked that the duty of liberals is to imagine the future. It is a noble task. If we do not imagine it, it will never happen. And if we do not re-imagine it, we will forfeit it.

Notes

Hardacre, Helen, Everett Mendelsohn, and Majid Tehranian, eds.Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education. Edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby. Vol. 2, The Fundamentalism Project. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Garvey, John H., Timur Kuran, and .David C. Rapopor, eds. Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance. Edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby. Vol. 3, The Fundamentalism Project. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993.

Nancy T., Robert Eric Frykenberg, Samuel C. Heilman, and James Piscator, eds. Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements. Edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby. Vol. 4, The Fundamentalism Project. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Marty, Martin E., and R. Scott Appleby, eds. Fundamentalisms Comprehended. Vol. 5, The Fundamentalism Project. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995.

--------, eds. Fundamentalisms Observed. Vol. 1, The Fundamentalism Project. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994.

Ammerman, Nancy T. "American Protestant Fundamentalism." in Marty, Martin E., and R. Scott Appleby, eds.Fundamentalisms Observed. Vol. 1, Fundamentalism Project. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994, 1-65.

Aristotle, "Politica." Trans. Benjamin Jowett. In Basic Works of Aristitle, ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Randon House, 1941.

Barr, James. "'Abba' Isn't 'Daddy.'" Journal of Theological Studies. (1988) 39:28-47.

Dobson, James C. The New Dare to Discipline. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1992.

Jeremias, Joachim. The Lord's Prayer. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964.

Lakoff, George. Moral Politics, How Liberals and Conservatives Think. 2 ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

------- Philosophy in the Flesh, the Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Metzger, Bruce. Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. London: United Bible Societies, 1971.

Newberg, Andrew, Eugene D'Aquill, and Vince Rause. Why God Won't Go Away, Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. New York: Ballatine, 2002.

Outler, Albert C. John Wesley. New York: Oxford University, 1964.

Scott, Bernard Brandon. Re-Imagine the World, an Introduction to the Parables of Jesus. Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press, 2002.

Soros, George. George Soros on Globalization. New York: Public Affairs, 2002.

Wesley, John. "Thoughts Upon Slavery." The Works of John Wesley, edited by Thomas Jackson. London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1872. Reprinted Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1958-9, 11:59-79.

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