Faith's Edge

this is absolutely true, but not in the sense that people haven't always desired literalism. people desire simplicity. i feel like, sometimes, what postmodern theory has done is create a world where you need to have a ten-year conversation or debate before feeling like you can make the simplest decisions with any integrity. its much more desirable to briefly consider which literalist maxim applies here and act on it.

our culture is obsessed with information - not knowledge, not understanding, not wisdom, but information. so every discussion is a barrage of information with no synthesis, no paring down, no meaning-making. whoever has the largest barrage of information wins. its sort of like an artillery-battle. the first one to run out of ammo is the loser.

what literalism, fundamentalism, or other strong ideologies do is they filter this information and help make meaning out of it. this, in turn, enables people to act in ways that they feel are correct without suffering an aneurism. this is one of the things that religion is supposed to do, but which most modern religion fails to do - hence the rise of fundamentalism in the modern era. (citation: Karen Armstrong)

and with the collapse of traditional culture, people have lost their filters. so our culture becomes, i think, so much white noise to most of the people living in it. what is important? what is meaningful? good answers are few and far between. we're taught to think that if we just have more information, more education, more differing viewpoints, then we'll understand. but we don't. we're just more lost than we were when we began.

so yeah, literalism is incredibly seductive. it gives someone the feeling that they can relax, that there are answers they can actually synthesize in their own day-to-day life, that they don't have to blindly obey the parade of experts who are marched through our lives by mass media. and, frankly, there's no competition in the meaning-making field. certainly not from liberalism, where information is treated like meaning when it most certainly isn't.

I think there certainly is _some_ truth in this if for no other reason that it is so oft repeated that it is bound to have influenced the way people think by now. Clearly this statement identifies a phenomenon we observe although I think it does so simplistically and it can be misleading.

Part of the reason I say this is because it is usually repeated by people who, like the secular reporter, or a group of liberal mainstream protestant seminary students, are on the other side of the fence from the ones that we say "desire simplicity". In a way it tends to reinforce our own sense that what we have is more complicated, which is a kind of intellectual superiority complex. It has this undercurrent of... "they're too stupid to appreciate the subtleties of a non-literal theology".

I don't believe it is really fair to take a large group of people with pretty diverse theology and try and lump them together on the basis of a single motivation. It's too reductionistic.

Instead, I think we should look for the vitality which clearly is in these groups we are calling literalist if they are so succesful at attracting intelligent, capable individuals. Part of it may be what Doug says about meaning above, another part might be "conviction" - which is something that evangelicals often have in abundance and we often lack. Yet another part, and this is the part that is scary, may be that the spirit is in what they're doing. It could be that God, objectively speaking, endorses they're movement by growing it. I don't know if this is so, but we ought not dismiss it too easily.

heh. i think a lot of that was a response to an argument i wasn't making. i tried to be really clear that i was saying that all human beings desire simplicity, not just biblical literalists. ("people desire simplicity", etc.) actually, i intended it to be a critique of my own culture, american protestant liberalism, pointing out the value in another position and how it attracts people by actually functioning in a beneficial way (filtering, meaning-making, etc.) while still trying to point out how that method is also lacking.

Well, I wasn't directly responding to your comment, but to Derrick's question and the article, although your comment was in the back of my mind.

The point is that I don't really think it is so much Biblical literalism that is seductive, but that many people who are literalists are also people of great conviction and authority. In fact, I often find that things which are too simple end up being faddish - ie: they don't last because there is no substance behind them. So rather than saying literalism is successful because it's simple I would say it's succesful because some element in the literalist/fundamentalist camp, be it the people or the theology or the spirituality, is profound - in a way that the white noise culture of information you describe is not.

ah, ok then. right-o. see you tomorrow.

I think this article points out something we can not discredit. Which is a person's desire to "belong."

Be it in a society of simplicity or complexity, the driving force behind many of these "evangelical" movements, in which she is reporting, are brought together for a common purpose. The simplicity only applies to starting to draw a line that you can get people to cross. IE, many on the evangelical front desire for as many as possible to be included and that to many in humanity is a valiant cause, one worth being passionate about.

So to answer your question, Derrick, I believe that people desire something literal because it's easier to "belong" to something that is black or white than shades of grey.

To expand on Nick's point, KIDS especially want to belong to something...especially if it's at least a little counter-cultural. They want to belong, and they want something more than what the "world" (for lack of a better term) is giving them.

It makes me sad to see that many "left of center" churches that consider themselves more inclusive, fail to reach out to youth, fail to welcome them, fail to give them a place to belong, fail to engage them in the counter-cultural lifestyle of following Christ.

Oh, pre-schoolers are welcome. They bring in more revenue.

I'm aware that I may be over-generalizing, so feel free to prove me wrong here. It just looks like conservatives care more about youth.