fundamentalist logic meets the ozone layer

by Stephen Lamb (<-read Stephen's blog) If you’ve read Matthew’s last book, Churched, or the new one, Hear No Evil, you’ll know that when he describes the religion of his childhood to those who don’t know anything about the peculiarities of that world, he says that Fundamentalist is shorthand for “scary beyond all reason.” Listening to Matthew’s recent interview with Wally on WAYFM’s Total Axxess Live, I heard Wally say something I’ve heard many times in my own conversations with friends about our childhood religious experiences. When Matthew started telling his story, Wally said, “you grew up like I did,” but after hearing Matthew’s stories about not being allowed to listen to rock music like Amy Grant and Sandi Patty – and later forging their signatures in the front of his Bible so he could be cool – Wally backtracked and said “okay, that’s more restrictive than my house.”

I thought of that interview one day last week when I found myself listening to recent sermons on the website from a church very similar to the one I grew up in. In fact, my great grandfather’s brother helped start this church fifty years ago, and it’s just down the road from where I live now. The sermons contained all the hallmarks of a good Fundamentalist sermon, like five minutes of gloating about what a glutton he was the past weekend, contrasted with the bit about how if you take one sip of alcohol, you’ll end up a drunk and kill someone while driving. And of course it contained the requisite ranting and yelling, and the defense of the King James Bible as the only correct version, inspired by God.
But what really stood out to me in the sermon is something I’ve come to term Fundamentalist Logic, which is most acutely manifest in discussions having anything to do with science, or the reasons why rock music is from the Devil. Here’s the bit I have in mind. Remember, this is from a sermon preached in the last month or two, not thirty years ago, as you might at first think.

When I started to tell a friend about this sermon just after I listened to it, he interrupted my account and asked, “So why do you listen to those sermons? Doesn’t it just make you mad?” My answer was that I want to make sure I remember my childhood correctly, that I’m not exaggerating or caricaturing the kind of sermons I heard growing up. Although to be honest, I don’t have a clue how one would caricature sermons like this. Of course, the downside of spending the day listening to this kind of sermon – or maybe the upside, depending on how you look at it – is that I end up drinking more that evening.

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