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Are humans truly able to “leave religion behind”, or are faith-based attitudes to some degree hard-wired inside us? I suspect the latter is somewhat true, and I’ll present some evidence today.
I’m also wondering if fundamentalism is the “default” mode of a hard-wired faith, a mode that people tend to revert to automatically, in the absence of anything better.
I’ll define fundamentalism as a strict literal interpretation of revered texts, along with a strong distinction between “us” (those who have the same beliefs) and “them” (others who don’t ascribe to the same beliefs), and a preoccupation both with the fear (e.g. of something like “hell”) and with guilt (e.g. sin).
From the year 2012 until the covid years, I attended a Unitarian church in the Seattle area. Initially, I was very much attracted not only by its inclusion of a wide range of world traditions, but also by its familiar services, which resemble those of traditional Protestant Christian churches that I attended in my childhood. In other words, I liked it because it had ties to my own past, and it was intellectually stimulating.
In my first years with the Unitarians, on one given Sunday, maybe we would do Sufi meditation. On another, the pastor enlightened us on the deeper meaning of an ancient Greek myth. During December, there were both Solstice and Christmas gatherings. The eclecticism of the church suited me well.
However, as the years progressed, and especially after Trump was elected in 2016, there was a change. The interesting eclectic services became fewer, and politicized sermons became more frequent. The problems of “Trump”, “racism”, or “climate change” became the sermon topics the majority of the time, it seemed. This became very tiresome for me, though many of my churchmates seemed energized by the new, more secular routine. In fact, they seemed duty-bound to make the church into an ideological showcase of progressivism.
Certainly, the Unitarian church has for a long time had a reputation for progressivism, but it was now feeling cultishly so. At a certain point, I realized it had actually become a fundamentalist church.
It sounds oxymoronic to describe a Unitarian church as fundamentalist, but that’s what it indeed was. It simply used a set of vocabulary words different from those of the Christian fundamentalist churches. For example, the word “Satan” was replaced with the word “Trump” by the Unitarians. The concept of “original sin” was replaced by “racism”. The fear of “hellfire” became the fear of “climate change”.
Many Unitarians are atheist or agnostic, but even those seemed fanatically religious on all these progressive issues. I realized that a secular religion was being born. These sophisticated secularists were in fact following all the archetypes of traditional religious fundamentalists, complete with all the fear, shame, self-flagellation, and strict narrowness of allowed opinion.
Like any fundamentalism, the new secular version needed to be able to distinguish sanctified information from heresy in some clear and simple way. Christians or Muslim fundamentalists have the Bible or the Koran which they can interpret literally, without using critical or insightful thinking. In or around 2017, the new authorized holy text for progressives became, say, “trusted sources” like CNN and NPR, and “fact-checking” agencies became the priesthood in charge of deciding what was heresy and what was to be trusted. Whole news agencies—any of them that reported anything un-negative about Trump—were now being shunned as “unreliable” by believers in this secular fundamentalism. The belief seemed to be that by eliminating media consumption of anything pro-Trump, then the evil in society—or at least in oneself—would be purged. The simple beauty of this is that the whole of Fox news no longer had to be argued with. It could just be summarily dismissed. Simplicity is perhaps the main temptation for adopting fundamentalism.
In the Unitarian church I was attending, the Sunday school teacher even started teaching the children how to resist “fake news”. (If you’ll remember, that term was then basically applied to news with a pro-Trump or anti-Democrat slant. It later morphed into the term “misinformation”.)
Of course, many of these same progressives at my church, just a few years earlier, would have supported protection of US industries as well as the goal of keeping the US out of foreign wars. But now that Trump as President was actually enacting such policies—unlike his immediate predecessors—he couldn’t get a word of praise. That’s because it was easy now for people not to see politics in any nuanced fashion. It was so simple now to have an opinion, as long as it was “Trump bad.”
Instead of hearing sermons based on world traditions, now in church I was more often hearing sermons on racial issues, particularly on the perennial shame that white people should feel, simply for being born. In other words, a new form of original sin. These sermons became so tiresome and frequent that I began to check sermon topics beforehand, in order to skip Sundays that had a racial or “equity” theme. And of course there was the frequent self-blame regarding how there were so few people-of-color in the congregation. From my perspective, I wondered why many black people would ever want to join a church of overly self-conscious and self-blaming progressive white people.
With regard to climate change, of course Greta Thunberg became a great hero in the church, a topic of sermons in the sanctuary and lessons in the Sunday school. Her dire warnings and supremely superior scoldings became another reminder of how awfully sinful we all are, and of the future hell we face if we do not mend our ways. The idea became commonplace that the world would come to an end in a huge human-induced climate catastrophe. (Never mind the actual science. Never mind the depressive psychological effect of such claims on kids. Never a mention of the actually increasing polar bear population.) Greta was thought of like a John the Baptist, complete with the angry ill-manners, and since most of the congregants were quite comfortable in their spacious, well-heated homes, the only thing for them to do was to wait for the coming of the new messianic regime that Greta was crying for, one that would save us and deliver us into a lifestyle that would be climate-friendly but still hopefully comfy. In the meantime, few of the congregants seemed to be cutting back on air travel. Hypocrisy is a byproduct of all sorts of fundamentalism, it seems.
By 2020, the new secular fundamentalism had been developing in both complexity and in the number of its adherents. This was not just happening in the Unitarian church. The same secular fundamentalism was becoming strong all around my “enlightened” city of Seattle. It’s almost as though this religious behavior was most strongly reasserting itself—subconsciously of course—in people who fancied that they had left God behind years ago. The censorship and cancelling of non-progressive “heresy” opinion was even appearing in such mundane places as Nextdoor.com.
However, there was one thing that this new fundamentalism lacked: a sacrament, a ritual to bind all its believers together. That changed with the arrival of covid.
In 2020, I stopped altogether attending Unitarian services when the church went completely online. The only things that had kept me sometimes returning—prior to that point—were the conversation, contact with acquaintances, music, and some traditional holidays that the church celebrated. None of these were possible to any satisfying degree on Zoom.
However, I was still on the email list, so I became aware of when the new sacrament was announced. In order to return to any in-person services in 2021, after the governor’s closure orders were lifted, congregants would all have to get the covid vaccine.
The covid vaccine is a near-perfect sacrament for this fundamentalism. Getting the vaccine is a publicly visible act, especially through Facebook selfies. Similar to baptism, the vaccine claims to cleanse the vaccinee of a new deadly sin, that of potentially carrying a virus that could infect others. (Yes, I know that is a false CDC claim, but it has been widely believed nonetheless.) Similar to the wine of communion, the vaccine is a special substance that is taken into all the bodies of the believers, so that they can be sanctified together. In Christianity, wine and bread connect you physically with the spirit of Jesus and therefore God. In the new fundamentalism, the vaccine connects you with two new holy sources: a deified version of “Science” and the State.
Of course the idea that this vaccine was doing anyone any good was bonkers. From the outset, it was clear that the vaccine trials were not being done responsibly, and the early VAERS reports clearly showed a dismal safety profile. But it was heresy to mention such obvious truths. What was important was that everybody must vaccinate to be morally upstanding and to attend activities together. When churches reopened—including the Unitarian church I had attended—they again hung their “all are welcome” signs, not even sensing any irony in that message. Unvaccinated people were apparently non-entities at such churches now, at best evil spirits of a sort, and certainly not welcome.
Besides church attendance, many other activities in Seattle in 2021 became dependent on showing proof of vaccination: workplaces, offices, choirs, sports clubs, music lessons, eating at restaurants, museums, etc. It seemed the whole city was embracing this new sacrament of membership into the fundamentalist fold. It distinguished the good “us”—those who were vaccinated—from the wayward “them” who didn’t get the vaccine. Classic us/them fundamentalism. The governor of the state of Washington, in a speech, even equated the unvaccinated with bomb-toting domestic terrorists. In the meantime, I made a lot of new heretical, unvaccinated friends, all of us literally “outsiders” now because we weren’t allowed to enter many establishments.
The theologians of the new fundamentalist regime were a collection of modern secular priesthoods: public health officials, university professors, fact-checkers, media pundits, as well as establishment scientists. (Establishment scientist are those who are good at designing studies to support the status quo, often of the “modeling study” variety, in which the input variables can be pre-determined in order to produce the desired result.)
To this date, the same fundamentalist regime still holds sway in many cities, though its influence seems now to be developing some cracks.
In previous parts of this substack, I’ve referred to this new secular fundamentalism as the “vaccine religion” or as “Scientism”. It is basically the ideology behind the governmental form know as technocracy. By any name, this ideology sees the duo of government and science/technology as being the primary solver of problems, the source of salvation. The science/tech half of this duo is, of course, tied to corporations, so it resembles classic fascism, which by typical definition is a fusing of state and corporate power, along with a elimination of rivalry. The promise of such a fascistic regime is that it can “get things done”, by liquidating opposition.
The elimination of rivals to secular fundamentalism has certainly happened in various places in the US in relation to corona mania. In the state of Washington—just as one example with which I am most familiar—the governor mandated vaccines for all state workers, which effectively became a purge from government service of those who disagreed with the draconian public health measures. Even unvaccinated elected state legislators were not allowed to access their offices. As has been well documented in mainstream news, there has been an outflow of population from the more-locked-down states to the less-locked-down ones. Much of the emigration has undoubtedly been comprised of people fleeing vaccine mandates. Certain states in the US are now becoming balkanized, with some becoming secular fundamentalist strongholds and others attracting the opponents of that belief.
There is no reason to assume that if someone goes to a church, mosque or temple that they will not be a secular fundamentalist. I know longtime Presbyterians and Catholics who are obviously secular fundamentalists. This is possible because the “God” of secular fundamentalism—which is the marriage of state and tech—is much more efficacious in most people’s day-to-day experience. The presence of the Christian God, for example, might be felt only in Sunday services and in bedtime prayers, and most Christians view God in rather abstract terms anyway. In contrast, the holy pairing of government and tech is now seemingly more ubiquitous and more omniscient. The widespread faith in these institutions causes the unvaccinated to be fired via mandates. These institutions—which together form the new secularist supreme being—truly matter and are truly to be feared.
“Sophisticated” well-educated people whose connection to a spiritual God has become tenuous or nonexistent are the ones who are most vulnerable to secular fundamentalism. It’s as though their minds easily revert to archetypal patterns of faith and fear because of the spiritual void inside them. Just like the religious fundamentalists, they seem to take comfort in simple answers and in group identification.
It’s interesting that many secular fundamentalists turn their noses up at religious fundamentalists, despite the similarities. Religious fundamentalists are often considered uneducated rubes by the urbane secularists. The secularists see the religious fundamentalists as being inferior because of their lack of critical thinking, their narrow attitudes, and their refusal to accept certain types of scientific knowledge such as evolution. Ironically the secular fundamentalists have a similar uncritical fatuousness in favor of their political favorites, a similar narrowness in their trusted information sources, and a very parallel refusal to accept any scientific knowledge that disrupts their conviction in things like vaccines. So much for a university education!
If I had to choose one of these two paths—religious fundamentalism or secular fundamentalism—I’d certainly choose the former. Religious fundamentalists are at least rooted in history and tradition. They have something firm to hang onto, and I suspect that’s the reason that they were generally less affected by corona mania and more skeptical of lockdowns, masking, etc. Many of their churches stayed open. In contrast, secular fundamentalists are at the whims of modern, quixotic, demi-gods that are obvious in their greedy motives and fallibility: Fauci, Gates, and the WHO, for example. Secular fundamentalists are the tragically manipulable “jellyfish people” I wrote of in Part 1 of this substack (links for earlier posts are listed at the top of this article).
Another particular weakness of secular fundamentalism is that it is so dependent on immediate fear. Religious fundamentalists have the fear of hellfire, but hell comes later, after death. The secular fundamentalists can be conditioned to fear anything current: Trump, a virus, the possibility of accidentally committing a “racist microagression”, etc. The objects of fear change at the whim of those controlling the strings of their smartphone newsfeeds. Secular fundamentalism in a way is ultimately a sort of crash-and-burn faith, because of this lack of consistent conviction. But don’t underestimate its staying power. The crashing and burning will take place as long as people are addicted to their phones, on which a new object of mass fear can be manufactured at any time. Devotees of this faith must somehow be jarred from their fear-hypnotized state. Often a vaccine injury might do that, but sometimes even that is not enough.
According to Matthias Desmet, in his recent book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, the principle method of disrupting such hypnotism is simply for sensible people to speak out in public against the controlling narrative. It seems reasonable that as secular fundamentalists hear an increasing number of public counterpoints, their rather tenuous faith can slowly dissolve.
(By the way, Desmet’s book is centered on the psychosis of “mass formation” a sort of fear-based mania that is the basis for totalitarian regimes. I suspect that secular fundamentalism has simply been the fertile ground in which the most recent mass formation—corona mania—grew.)
Although I prefer religious fundamentalism to the secular variety, my preference is for neither. How they both miss the complex beauty of reality! That’s why I’m a Naturalist instead. Still, I wouldn’t doubt if I have a fundamentalist quirk or two because fundamentalism might simply be part of our human nature. I see it as the dark side of a usually good and adaptive human trait: the tendency toward group cooperation and group defense.
Below is a list of some general characteristics of either Naturalists or secular fundamentalists. It’s unlikely that any individual would be completely one or the other, so the question is: which section describes you best? You might see a bit of yourself in either section, or see yourself somewhere in the middle. Do you feel like you’ve ever shifted from one type to the other on any issues?
Some Characteristics of a Naturalist
* Questions new technology and its effects.
* Sees science and technology as distinct endeavors (e.g. vaccines are tech, not “science”).
* Honors true science, which is based on genuine curiosity about any aspect of nature or society (within ethical limits).
* Carefully considers scientific evidence that counters current knowledge.
* Encourages real, in-person group meeting and conservative use of smartphones.
* Looks for truth in many sources, accepts that no single source is the arbiter of truth.
* Uses means to judge his/her own ethics with regard to nature or society, rather than to accept expert-imposed standards (see Parts 5 to 7 of this substack).
* Believes that morality can be inherent in material nature as well as in society, tradition, and spirit.
* Recognizes that there are spiritual aspects to existence beyond the material.
* Considers nature to be God, and practices that are in line with nature, including natural medicine, to be the source of life and hope.
* Believes in the superiority of nature with respect to health, and in the personal freedom to decide treatments.
* Has a “pro-biotic” outlook: humans best live in harmony with their ecology, including the microbiome of viruses and bacteria.
* Has a DIY approach toward health. May sometimes seek expert advice.
Some Characteristics of a Secular Fundamentalist
* Adopts new tech with little regard to consequences. Generally sees tech as a wonder or even a savior.
* Incorrectly uses the term “science” to describe technological products such as vaccines or smartphones.
* Believes in science which has been tailored to fit political aims. Avoids science that investigates anything that might be out of favor with the status quo.
* “Turns off” if confronted by scientific evidence that counters beliefs. May try to “cancel” the person who confronts him/her with such evidence.
*Encourages “alone together” or virtual meetings, and frequent dependence on devices.
* Trusts in simple answers from “correct” sources vetted by fact checkers and government officials.
* Emphasizes the inescapable sinfulness of people either due to latent racism, contribution to climate change, refusal to vaccinate, etc.
* Believes in utilitarian ethics. Good and bad are measured by public outcomes, which involve the calculations of experts.
* May even be a traditional church member, but believes chiefly in the material world, and tends to be very afraid of death.
* Looks toward the State and toward a tech-driven view of “science” as the road to salvation. Considers modern tech-driven medicine to be generally superior.
* Believes in the infallibility of vaccines, masks, and other public health directives, and considers them to be a sign of inclusion into the group.
* Has an “anti-biotic” outlook and a tendency toward hypochondria. Believes humans should constantly strive to identify and eradicate elements of the microbiome.
* Trusts only health information from “experts” such as status-quo medical doctors or public health officials.
Certainly the belief in secular fundamentalism advanced itself considerably during the years of corona mania, but a lot of its advancement was illusory, based on manipulation and coercion rather than on sincerity. Many of the people who were frightened into taking the “sacramental” vaccine are now understanding what happened. I have great hope that in the long run we will see a lot more people questioning secular fundamentalist beliefs and seeing the need for a consciously non-fundamentalist spirituality and ethics such as Naturalism.