Calling Out Fundamentalist Privilege

I’m calling b.s. on fundamentalist privilege.

Oh yeah, “fundamentalist privilege” is a thing. In fact, I want to argue that, at least in America, fundamentalist privilege has screwed up the adventure of following Jesus by giving everybody the impression that only conservatives take the Bible seriously.

However, to make my case, I’m going to have to set down what I mean by both “fundamentalist” and “privilege.” Permit me to begin with the second term first: privilege.

Let me see if I can get to the heart of “privilege” by looking at one particularly relevant variation of it at the moment — white privilege.

I’ve been thinking about white privilege quite a bit of late. Difficult not to, isn’t it? I mean, what with Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and all.

As a middle-class (though slightly shady-looking) white guy, I can walk down the street, see a police car, and never think twice about whether or not I’ll be accosted. Even looking the way I do, with long hair and a beard, wearing combat boots and a black leather trench coat, when I walk into a fancy department store I never notice anybody following me around. Walking down the street, it never occurs to me to think that other people are crossing the street so they don’t have to pass by me at close range.

But white privilege isn’t just about being able to avoid unpleasant encounters; it’s taking for granted that, all things being equal, you don’t even have to worry about having unpleasant encounters. Why not? Because you’re normal — and normal people don’t get followed in Macy’s. Normal people don’t have to think about wearing a hoodie or whether driving a Lexus will raise suspicion. Normal people don’t shot in the street by police officers without a good reason.

Privilege, then, is being able to take for granted that you occupy a social location uncontroversially, a social location that you and the culture you inhabit regard as “normal” — that is, the normative location that sets the standard against which all other locations are evaluated. In this case, we live in a culture that assumes that white middle-class life is the norm (i.e., “normal”) and that all other variations (e.g., African American, Latino, Asian, etc.) are just that … variations on the norm. Privilege means participating in a system (cultural, legal, political, etc.) that was built for people like you, and assumes that people who aren’t like you bear the burden of proof in order to be taken seriously by the system.

That’s privilege. On to fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism — at least in the form I want to talk about it, which is specifically Christian — among other theological assertions, insists on a way of reading the Bible as an inerrant document originating in the mind of God and unfailingly transmitted through human scribes. Theologically, historically, scientifically, geographically — all God, all the time. No mistakes. No mid-life crisis days for Paul. No ax-grinding or personal-story-telling-emphasis-spotlighting by the Gospel writers. It’s perfect, just what God intended — or at least it was in its original form.

And if the Bible is perfect, it’s universally perfect for all times and all places … except when it’s not. That’s the problem with a common-sense literalist interpretation of Scripture.

A fundamentalist reading of the Bible claims a consistency in interpretation it can’t deliver on. Fundamentalists require extraordinarily elaborate hermeneutical tap dancing, for instance, to explain from the same verse why being a gay man is wrong always and everywhere, but is putting to death for being a gay man belongs to another time and place (Leviticus 20:13).[1]

But, according to the dominant cultural reading of Scripture, if you don’t believe gay people are taking the first available Uber to Perdition Avenue, you’re the problem. If you happen to believe as I do that the scope of the Bible’s concerns about LGBT people are cultural (and not universal) expressions that address a world with different fears and biases than the one we inhabit, then the current presumption seems to be that your hermeneutical project is somehow to circumnavigate the “plain sense” of the Bible.

It’s the whole “‘plain sense’ of the Bible” stuff that I want to challenge since it’s that interpretive presumption that lies at the heart of fundamentalist privilege. And this presumption advances an implicit claim that fundamentalists take the Bible seriously, that they alone study it for the purpose of being transformed by it, that because they often claim to read Scripture literally, they’re reading of it is the closest to being “what God intended” — while all other interpretations are merely self-serving exercises in avoidance, designed to provide the interpreter permission to do what a properly formed conscience wouldn’t otherwise allow her to get away with.

Look at a few of the ways this fundamentalist presumption gets expressed (because, you know, if you don’t believe these things, you don’t believe the Bible):

The certainty of a literal six-day creation, which took place sometime less than 10,000 years ago
The belief that women were created by God as (or received from God as a punishment for their role in duping the hapless Adam) submissives, whose path to pleasing God required them (perhaps not coincidentally?) first to please their male “protectors”
[From the not-so-optional Patriot Upgrade Package] The full-throated confidence that America has become the hope of the world, God’s chosen people, set apart to bring the good news of Capitalism and Democracy to the rest of the earth’s benighted souls — which is why good Christians can justify their vituperative hatred of Socialists, Muslims, and Barack Obama (the naming of which three together, in certain hands, is a redundancy)
The conviction that God hates LGBT folks, as well as the cowards who fail to denounce them with the appropriate brio
The certitude, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding (see, for instance, Matthew 6:5–8, 16–18), that God is heavily invested in public piety, which requires that true Christians protect civic displays of devotion on courthouse walls and city hall lawns and in public school classrooms
The enduring (and perhaps a bit too enthusiastic?) belief that God loves us too much not to devise a way of punishing us torturously, excruciatingly, unendingly (but lovingly) if we don’t feel the right things in our hearts

Look, I’m not saying that fundamentalists don’t love the Bible. What I’m saying is that their love of the Bible (in concert with confidence in an Enlightenment epistemology that regularly prompts us to believe that we can know more than we do) has often distorted their ability to interpret it well.

Which distorted ability on its own would be one thing. But the rest of us always seem to have to follow behind to try to clean up the messes.

And fundamentalist privilege means that there are always way too many messes adequately to clean up.

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Previously published on Medium.com.

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