Yesterday, I posted an entry encouraging everyone to go see Saved!, especially here in the Jackson area, where movies of this power are rare as hen’s teeth.
On this morning’s Today Show, a fundamentalist wacko guest appeared to address the so-called “Saved! Controversy.” He’s tired, he said, of seeing Hollywood portray Christians as stilted, inflexible hypocrites and handicapped kids who have sex with Jews and believe in nothing at all as the cool kids.
“This leads us down the road of moral relativism! Look at the end of this movie! It tells us there are no moral absolutes … that nothing is black and white, and that everything is gray! [Where does that lead us?] In America, we’re putting pizza in our ovens. In Germany, they’re putting Jews in their ovens … and [if there are no moral absolutes] it’s all the same!”
Oh. My. God.
The guy provides a textbook example of The Fundamentalist Delusion (TM). Fundamentalists talk a lot about “moral absolutes.” The Fundamentalist Delusion (TM) involves convincing yourself that:
a) moral absolutes exist, and
b) you’ve got a grip on what they are, and
c) it’s your job to enforce ’em.
Note that, in the definition above, I’m not saying that moral absolutes don’t exist. Instead, I’m saying fundamentalists mistake their conclusions about moral absolutes for the moral absolutes themselves.
I know this brand of delusion well, because I’ve been there. As a fundamentalist, I pretended that Scripture was “of no private interpretation.” I was fond of saying, “The Bible means what it says, and it says what it means.” We frequently taught that any honest individual with a fifth grade education could read and understand the simple truths of the King James Bible.
Scripture was of no private interpretation, we said — but we were chomping at the bit to tell others exactly what we thought the Scriptures meant. It never occured to us that Scriptures that needed so much explaining might not, in fact, be as simple or as self-evident as we claimed.
“The Bible means what it says, and says what it means” — but we never hesitated to apply elaborate rules of interpretation when they suited our purposes.
The Bible, for example, says Jesus made wine at a wedding — and not just any wine, mind you, but the best wine served at the wedding. One guest remarks, with reference to Jesus’ wine-making skills, “Usually, hosts save the best wine first, and when everyone has had so much wine they can’t tell the difference anymore, the hosts break out the less expensive stuff. But you’ve saved the very best wine until the end!”
This didn’t set well with our tee-totalling approach to alcoholic abstinence, so we devised elaborate word studies in an effort to prove that Jesus didn’t make wine (as Scripture clearly teaches). Instead, he made grape juice! A bizarre conclusion indeed for folks who taught that the Bible means what it says and says what it means.
Perhaps the most insidious position we took, though, involved saying, “Any honest person could read the Scripture and reach the same conclusions we have.” The assumption, of course, is that anyone reaching conclusions other than ours must then be dishonest … usually, we imagined, because they were nursing some sinful agenda they didn’t want to abandon.
When a fundamentalist starts spouting nonsense about moral absolutes, here’s what you can do:
a) Ask for a list of them. He’ll want to dodge this issue by saying, “Read the Bible,” but this gives you the opportunity to point out a lot of people, even people within the same church, read the Bible and come up with different conclusions about its teachings. “Could you, please, point out which parts of the Bible are moral absolutes that everyone must agree on, versus those parts that aren’t?”
b) Point out that he’s not really talking about moral absolutes. Unless he’s God, he’s talking about his own imperfect conclusions about moral absolutes and what they are. What he’s really angry about, then, is the fact that not everyone shares his conclusions … which, of course, raises the spectre that his conclusions could be wrong. (Fundamentalists, by the way, hate the idea that they could be wrong.)
The guy on this morning’s TODAY show was clearly angry: he was red-faced, spluttering, and indignant. I’ve been there … and so I have some additional insight into what he’s really angry about.
Saved! depicts handicapped, foul-mouthed, non-believing, Jewish, gay, pregnant, mistake-making, imperfect kids as worthy, noble, compassionate people who may, in their love for each other, be closer to Jesus than a lock-step fundamentalist can be. Portraying these kids as human conflicts with the fundamentalist mindset that teaches anyone with different beliefs is less perfect, less worthy … and, let’s face it, a little less than human.
The idea that such people might do anything of merit without the benefit of the fundamentalist’s guidance galls the fundamentalists to the very core of their miserable little souls.
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