Dear Joe,
I've been reading all your eclectic and electric essays on joebageant.com over the past few months. Let me just say, "Yeeeeeha!" Being plugged into Joe Bageant for the first time is something like sticking your finger in the power socket. You may not be quite sure what it is but you damn well know you've got a hold of something! That much truth just makes my hair stand on end.
Anyway, reading your essays is a great insight into the fundamentalists' beliefs of the working-class, but I thought I'd let you know about my own experiences in the world of middle-class Christian fundamentalism. This is a problem that has transcended class boundaries in the US and in supposedly more rational cultures overseas. Within 50 kilometres of where I'm sitting there are several mega-churches with congregations in the thousands -- and this is in good old agnostic, sinful Sydney, Australia.
I got my biggest taste of middle-class fundamentalism in California, and it was certainly the mega-church kind. The church I was involved with had its own elementary, junior and senior highs, its own college campus (which taught professional disciplines as well as theology). This seems to be the major difference between middle-class fundamentalists and the backwoods Virginia kind you are intimate with. They like to herd in huge numbers, and they like to build parallel infrastructure, but let me tell you, Joe, when you get to talking about the beliefs of your backwoods brethren -- I couldn't tell the difference between the self-educated sons of the soil and the degreed-up college boys.
"Left Behind"? They love it. I remember watching a low budget shocker of a movie as part of our youth group activities "A Thief in the Night"). All the elements of the later Left Behind series were there. The sudden rapture, the fear, the self-loathing, the horrors those who remained had to endure, the liberal minister who didn't get raptured (as I recall none of the Catholics or Episcopalians went). There was one charming moment in this 'film' when one of the heroes sends his kid to the guillotine rather than dis Jesus. I shake my head in disbelief over it now, but read the reviews on Amazon -- most recommend you buy it! One guy claims to be a Hollywood producer now -- how middle-class can you get?
We had this sort of fear poured on us by the truckload. Are you right with Jesus? He's coming back soon. Wars and rumours of wars, and etc. You could step under a bus tomorrow - which way would you go? Up or DOWN? And believe me even if you had just come out of a prayer service where you had given yourself body and soul to Jesus (again) there was still a huge fear that it would be DOWN. You were never saved enough to actually feel safe.
Then there are the books. Written by eminent men mostly with two or three degrees (and some even from real universities). Books that prophesied all sorts of things that never came true -- like a Soviet invasion of the US Midwest via Canada, and declared Kissinger the anti-christ. All written by solid middle-class intellectuals who just don't happen to inhabit the same planet as rational people.
It was all there. It was the air you breathed, the water you drank, the food you ate (have you ever had your food go stone cold while some giggle-head let fly with a 40 minute grace?)
How can this happen? How can decent, educated, middle-class people buy into this nonsense? In one of your essays you called this a parallel society. And it is true you can be hatched, matched, and dispatched while embedded in this society while never once setting foot in the real world.
But I think it goes further than inhabiting a place where the bad ideas and the sex crazed bodies of the evil secular humanists can't get at you. It goes even further than simple fortress thinking -- it is a kind of Orwellian doublethink.
As a fundamentalist I must believe absolutely that evolution is a lie of the devil and that mutations are never beneficial to any organism, while at the same moment I am stocking up on Tamiflu just in case the bird flu mutates into a form that is easily transmissible from human to human. I must believe both that God is love, but that good hearted people will burn in hell for just as long as Hitler (eternity) for their failure to have a relationship with Jesus. I must believe that I have a relationship with Jesus even though I have never had a conversation with him, and so on.
So that's how decent, decently educated people inhabit this strange parallel world in my view -- through doublethink.
The human mind is an incredible thing. It can believe three impossible things before breakfast without even working up a sweat.
The fact that fundamentalism has at its roots this kind of treacherous self-deception, a duality enforced by that unyielding place where reality and belief meet, is why it is so painful for fundamentalists to come to grips with the real world. The shrinks call it cognitive dissonance.
This is why fundamentalism is so tainted with fear and loathing. It's not easy to live life with your mind divided against itself. Doubts creep in, and doubt and faith rubbed together make black, oozing fear. Fear that causes the fundies to lash out at anyone who highlights those doubts by saying, doing, or simply living in ways that don't reinforce the fundamentalists conscious world view.
And who can blame them? Cognitive dissonance is a bitch.
For years after I began to bootstrap myself out of that mindset I was plagued by fears I knew to be utterly baseless, but couldn't shake. Byron is said to have been tormented by the fear of hell (he was raised a strict Calvinist) even though he was fully aware that such fears were irrational and ridiculous.
Even now, getting on for two decades later and after truckloads of education, I can't come home and find the house empty without thinking "Rapture!" and wondering when the fireballs are gonna start flying! Crazy, I know, but arrrgh, so hard to shake. I know what Byron went through.
So anyway, I guess I just wanted to say that being middle-class, being educated, is not necessarily any defence against fundamentalism. Don't ask me what is (although reading essays like yours helps).
Maybe we need a vaccine.
Cheers,
Baden
Sydney, Australia
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Dear Baden:
You observations are so good I don't know what one would say in reply. WE have those "educated middle class fundamentalists" here too. I just don't write about them because I like to stick to my own kind of people. Tell you one thing I've found though -- scratch the surface and you will find that those middle class fundies are usually educated in technical and business matters, and seldom grasp the humanities. Not one in a hundred knows who Rimbaud was. Nor do they read the truly significant books of these times. There's education and there's education.
Solidarity,
Joe
