When Sarah Palin became the Republican nominee for the Vice Presidency in August, 2008, her membership in the Wasilla Assembly of God, a Christian fundamentalist congregation, immediately came to the fore. Many of the best and brightest reacted reflexively. Her membership in such a church constituted at least presumptive evidence that she was, if not actually dangerous, at the very least, stupid.
I march to my own drummer. Sarah Palin had been too spectacularly successful in achieving too many goals - beauty pageants, girls's basketball, Alaskan municipal and regional politics - to be dumb, IQ scores and Ivy League degrees be damned. There was one success in particular that interested me. This was her renegotiation in 2006 of the Alaskan pipeline construction and lease with a consortium of oil companies. This was almost universally regarded as a triumph for Governor Palin, before her ascent in Republican politics provided cause to question her competence in all areas. There was some fairly neutral journalism written by a couple of local reporters documenting her success.
I found this interesting in view of the former Governor's membership in the Wasilla Assembly of God. Think about it for a second. The simple existence of oil, the mere fact that such a substance is, is a devastating commentary on Biblical fundamentalism - unless a True Believer takes the position that God used this glop to cement the Earth together on Day Three or Four or whatever. I am not aware of any such theological approach. This is not to say a governor negotiating an oil pipeline contract has to become a petroleum engineer, because she obviously does not. But she does have to communicate with petroleum engineers, oil executives, and the like, all sorts of people and personalities with hyper-sophisticated scientific and technological backgrounds. She also has to be able to evaluate her own advisers and their advice, and distinguish the good from the bad - all of which Sarah Palin did, with considerable success.
There are also those 80 percent approval ratings, obviously a demographic a lot larger than Christian fundamentalists. Those approving must have included a lot of erudite and sophisticated Alaskan citizens. All of this bespeaks a world view a lot larger than that of a Biblical literalist. Yet she is a member of the Wasilla Assembly of God, and clearly comfortable in the congregation. Interesting.
So what goes on here? Does Sarah Palin's membership in the fundamentalist church brand her as stupid? The mainstream media thought so. Or does her ability to lay the tenets of the church to one side when dealing with the practicalities of Alaskan oil make her a hypocrite? That would certainly be the alternative position of the mainstream media, which has not exactly been charitable towards this particular public personality. My own thought is that both answers are way, way too simple. I think the answer lies elsewhere.
I live in Santa Clara Valley, California, which most of the world calls 'Silicon Valley'. It's an extremely multicultural community - the high tech opportunities have brought, eager technologists from all over the world - and extremely sophisticated, dominated by Stanford and Santa Clara Universities, and only 35 miles south of San Francisco. In this ultra-civilized environment, there are more than 150 private schools in operation. Here's a list. Maybe two-thirds of these have religious affiliations, and maybe half of those are committed to a philosophy most would characterize as Fundamentalist. (I am not including any Catholic or Episcopal schools in that number.) The vast majority of these institutions are Christian. There are a half-a-dozen Jewish affiliated schools, and one Islamic elementary school. Based on the school descriptions, these are apparently Fundamentalist as well.
The enrolment in most Christian Fundamentalist schools is a mixture of Caucasian and Asian students, with Asian enrolment averaging around 40 percent. Here's another list, which contains that information. To the best of my knowledge, there is no site that summarizes the annual costs systematically, but from what schools DO disclose the figure, tuition begins at about $6,000 for elementary school. High schools cost around $10,000. Valley Christian, the flagship of these institutions and a local athletic power, charges a little over $13,000 for the first child, $12,000 for a second - many of these families will educate two or more children at such a school.
The point should be obvious. The parents who pay this sort of money to send their sons and daughters to these sort of schools are not doing so with the expectation that these students will go on to divinity schools at bible colleges and become pastors of small, revelation churches. They have the same dreams and ambitions for their children as those who send theirs to secular schools. The academic presentation at The King's Academy, a Christian school in Sunnyvale, is typical. The school is unambiguously and unapologetically Christian, describing itself as a "Christ-centered college preparatory middle and senior high school for students who have teachable hearts and coachable spirits. We offer a loving, family environment where students are encouraged to grow in their relationship with Jesus, their family, teachers, and other". This is a philosophy that can fairly be described as Fundamentalist. Enrollment is about 800, a quarter of whom are Asian, 10 percent Black/Hispanic, and the balance Caucasian. Annual tuition is just under $10,000.
To these students, the school offers AP classes in chemistry and biology, as well as calculus, history, and English. According to its presentation, about 60 percent of the AP candidates score 3, 4, or 5. College counseling focuses at the University of California and California State University system. The students who attend the school fully expect to matriculate there, or at a any number of quality schools around the country.
I don't want to overdo this. Santa Clara County abounds with private schools that emphasize intense academic performance and achievement. The King's Academy is not one of them. But it should be apparent that the families who choose this secondary education for their children have pretty much the same ambition for them as any of the families who go the secular route. Also, it is not possible for the King's Academy students even to sit for AP examinations in biology and chemistry without a thorough grounding in contemporary scientific theory. Yet the school's emphasis on a direct, personal relationship with Jesus clearly marks it as fundamentalist in nature.
One preliminary point before heading toward the crux. It's a big mistake to equate Fundamentalist Christianity with Biblical literalism, or even that a believer is necessarily unscientific. Congregants in Fundamentalist sects exhibit the same infinite variety and degrees of belief in the orthodoxy of the faith, and the same flexibility with respect to difficult facts, as believers in any other faith. (I hope that does not sound too patronizing.) That's why Palin could be a devout member of the Wasilla Assembly of God, and simultaneously handle oil pipeline negotiations so capably. The apparent cognitive dissonance no more troubles her than it troubles religious people in faiths that are more 'acceptably' mainstream.
Which segues neatly to the major point. It's a fair bet that the parents who choose The King's Academy have the same awareness of the difficulty of truth, the same experience of the problems of faith, the same issues reconciling higher principles with self-interest, the same doubts as to any absolute in a universe in which so much is relative, as those of my neighbors who adopt the more conventional, secular humanistic point of view. The core theology of all the traditional religions flies squarely in the face of scientific fact and theory that they accept without question in every day life, that some of them use daily - they know that, too. They know also of the social stigma that attaches to adherents of Fundamentalist congregations. So there is a real question as to why these choices are made by intelligent people, in the face of so much they know and experience - for, as noted above, I believe it's a slander to think that this is a matter ot diminished intelligence.
It has been my own belief for many years that these are actually ethical and values decisions masquerading as metaphysical and religious. Fundamentalists don't accept the dogma of the religion and then adopt its values. They seize on the values and then adopt the dogma to reinforce and emphasize their significance. The dogma serves two purposes - first, grounding the values in religious text of infallible quality makes the values themselves immune from the attack of relativism. Second, the dogma is a mechanism for unifying the community, a set of shared symbols under which the believers can gather. The fact that the belief system is the object of scorn and derision generates a nice stigma of oppression that gives the unifying religious metaphors all the greater unifying force. Fundamentalists defend the truth of Genesis because they're scared to death that, if it goes, the Ten Commandments go with it. As committed members of a community of the committed, they are likely to undercut publicly these unifying symbols. But at the personal level, one individual and the next, the ultimate privacy of the soul, belief in their literal truth? I doubt it very much - and this fact, though unacknowledged, is implicitly understood throughout the community.
That's the reason why The King's Academy can describe its principal goal as developing the personal relationship of its students with Jesus, and simultaneously offer classes in AP biology and chemistry. The two different languages don't correlate. The first is 'preacherspeak', an articulation of a moral and metaphysical approach to the problem of finding meaning in this dark and obscure universe. The second is scientific. The first don't signify with respect to the second. Stephen Gould, the wonderful and much missed Harvard palaeontologist, made this same point at much greater length and infinitely greater eloquence in his 1999 book 'Rocks of Ages. The applicable acronym is 'NOMA', Non Overlapping MagisteriA'.
It's as easy to nod your head in recognition of the insight of the Harvard public intellectual, as it is to overlook the fact that the fundamentalists at The King's Academy are practicing exactly what Gould preached. The difference - and it is not at all a small one - is the tacit acceptance of the duality. That has to do (in my opinion) with the hostility the fundamentalists perceive towards their social and moral values. They feel too besieged to admit the obvious fact that they do not apply the religious Magisteria to scientific matters.
The same insight applies to some of the more extravagant stated beliefs of the members of Jeremiah Wright's megagchurch in Chicago, Trinity United - for example, the notion that the AIDS virus was concocted by the United States government for some fiendish genocidal purpose. Talk to the Wright's congregants one at a time, and my belief is that you will find few, if any, that will sign on to this set of beliefs as individuals. What they are is a set of shared symbols that serve to express the collective - and rather profound - social alienation felt by the community as a whole.
(And why not? I am not African-American, nor do I believe that AIDS is a form of state-created germ warfare. But if I were, I might just possibly answer affirmatively to a pollster's question, regardless of what I thought. Why should I undercut the community of which I am a member, the friends that I like, in favor of an abstract and irrelevant truth? Besides, the expression of that belief says something important about what I think the of the relationship between the inner city African-American community and larger society. The bottom line is that talk is cheap. How I answer the poll isn't going to change anything - I know that - and the incorrect answer says much more about how I actually feel about the world than the literal truth.)
I don't want to press the analogy to the point of foolish consistency. There are some obvious differences between adherence to ancient religious orthodoxy and modern urban legend. But both are ultimately instances of 'preacherspeak' - a set of shared icons and/or social beliefs that, though expressed collectively as factual truth, in reality have metaphorical significance, as a statement about moral and social values. The individuals in the respective communities have a tacit understanding of the limitations of the symbol set, demonstrating an instinctive understanding of Gould's NOMA. That's why Sarah Palin can negotiate oil pipeline leases skillfully, The King's Academy can post proud reports about the good performance on AP biology tests, and the members of the Trinity Church can do business with a health establishment that in theory of the same membership s trying to kill them all.
So what are the conclusions from all this? The basic point is the reason I wrote this post. The kids at The King's Academy, the congregants in Trinity United, aren't stupid. You can make them sound stupid by focusing on the symbols in which they express the strength of their convictions, but you'll be saying something about yourself, not them. If you want to engage them, you discuss the values that underly the metaphors, not the metaphors themselves.
But that leads to the second point. The stridency arises because the governing conventional wisdom of this culture never does engage with its opposition. It derides, it scorns, it excludes. it ignores - it never debates. Almost its primary governing characteristics is its snarkiness. Oh, so that's the sort of person you are. When Charlton Heston spoke to the membership of the NRA, the point that brought down the house wasn't his insistence on Second Amendment rights. They don't take us seriously, he said. They call us all nuts and crazies. They don't listen. That was the theme that resonated, not any of the substantive issues of gun ownership. They respond to the ridicule with zealotry, because dialog simply isn't possible.
I don't like zealotry, or, for that matter, fundamentalist religions, or true believers in urban myth. It seems to me that the challenge of living authentically in these times of feverish information overflow, is to insist on the core values of enlightened Western culture, a combination of basic Judaeo/Christian and English liberalism, without descending into any absolute. But on those annoying occasions when I'm mistaken for a conservative (I'm too idiosyncratic for any categorization, but more the oldest of old-style liberal than anything else), it's because I do share the same sense of embattlement with respect to these traditions. An insistence on the fundamental worth of all human beings, tolerance for others in the sense of letting them alone, a demand for equal treatment for everyone - this stuff began in churches like Wasillia and Trinity, not in faculty lounges or editorial offices. With few exceptions, the trendsetters all go over like ten pins when the bad times come and the winds change. If history is any gauge, they'd all be wearing armbands within a fortnight if a Fascist regime actually came to be. The only thing that never changes is the sneer.
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