Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.  Amen.

Countrymen,

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All of the Christian Fundamentalist groups here and elsewhere derive from the left wing of the Reformation. Church historians are unanimous — and accurate — in characterizing the various left wing groups during and after the Reformation (there were many but with only a few dogmatic differences between them) as left wing. Now, church historians in great numbers, especially in the mainstream, characterize the modern descendants of those left wing groups, namely, our modern Christian Fundamentalists, as right wing.

What gives?

Simply, these mainline church historians and the faculties in which they labor (at Union, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, in the mainline denominations) have moved left of the descendants of the left wing groups of the Reformation, from which position those groups appear to be right wing. They are right of these mainline church historians and the faculties in which they labor but they are still left in the taxonomy of the history and descent of the churches.

Explanation?

The fundamental issue of religion, culture and morality — that is, of the spiritual dimension of life, which characterizes human individuals and groups — is the residence of authority. Where is authority? This is the most pressing of all questions, all of which are existential.

The churches — and the similarly ambiguous organizations of the other religions — have shown through the years that, operationally, in daily life, there is a continuum of authorities in the horizontal direction and a single authority in the vertical direction and that both of these directions are operative at all moments of time, space, substance and causality.

The churches — and the organizations of the other religions — distinguish themselves into denominations or simply sects/groups by their choice/use of authority on the continuum in the horizontal direction and by their response, or lack of it, or exclusion from it(!), to the single authority in the vertical direction.

Since the churches — and the organizations of the other religions — participate in the conditions of existence, as does everything that exists, their actuality in the horizontal direction only more or less participates in the single authority in the vertical direction and can never coincide with it because the horizontal direction, in which the churches must per force participate in order to have actuality, is fraught with unavoidable ambiguity.

(Unambiguous life is a reality, though fragmentarily and in an anticipatory way only, but that is another topic.)

What is the continuum of authority in the horizontal direction?

It runs, by common accounting, from a left to a right or from a right to a left. It is a line of flavors, perhaps a very thick line, but a line. Or, it is a array of multi-dimensional potentialities (flavors). Practically, it is a set of authorities arising from and set before man having, in our experience, on the right the edicts of councils, governments, popes, etc. (hegemony) and on the left the impulses of individuals (autonomy). And innumerable combinations and permutations of this contrast in between its terms.

Daily life, of course, blends the terms of this contrast variously, moment to moment, situation to situation. The constant is the contrast itself.

The Reformation mainline restored the balance of autonomous and heteronymous authority in the horizontal direction of life from its deformation by the Vatican, which insisted, as now, on heteronymous authority — itself — in the horizontal AND the vertical directions of man’s life, both in spirit and in history.

(The term theonomy [Tillich’s] could be used to describe the balance the mainline of the Reformation restored in the churches, but that is another topic.)

However, the Reformation also occasioned a strong and widespread autonomous response to the Vatican’s heteronomy. This response is accurately characterized by historians as left wing because it emphasized the sole authority (autonomy) of individual experience (impulses) in the spiritual and even, sometimes, in the psychological, organic and inorganic dimensions. For example, out of the left wing of the Reformation came Erasmus, Voltaire, Locke, Hume, Darwin, Marx, Freud and Sartre, notwithstanding Marx and Freud were of Jewish ethnicity.

A panoply of left wing (autonomous and even antinomian) groups emerged from the Reformation, most deplored or condemned by the mainline Reformers, Luther and Calvin. The descendents of these groups have been many, especially in this country.

For example, early on, New England, originally and still profoundly Calvinist, was fertile ground for left-leaning groups — the Pilgrims, significantly, were not Puritans, they were Separatists — and from these emerged three strongly and persistently influential organizations based on autonomous authorities: Unitarianism, Transcendentalism and Christian Science.

The Southern States always had low church (emphasizing autonomy over heteronomy) leanings and these were driven to augmentation by sufferings attending the Civil War Between the States and the ruin and humiliation driven on the South by religiously left wing Northerners determined to impose (an oxymoron for autonomists) autonomy on one segment of the population and heteronomy on the other.

The autonomous — including sometimes antinomian — leanings of our Northern and Southern States — to include now all of the populations in them — migrated to all areas of our nation and have produced, among the churches, what we call Christian Fundamentalism. In cultural and moral functions these autonomous leanings have been highly productive nation-wide, as we are made to see daily.

We come by this state of affairs honestly and with deliberation from all of us. We made our bed and we are all in it. Northerners and Southerners and now also Midwesterners and Westerners preferred and prefer autonomy, in multiple guises, regionally expressed, but always autonomy.

We preferred and prefer the left side of the autonomy/heteronomy continuum of authority in the horizontal direction and we have achieved our goal in that respect. Computer-based communication and blogging, for example, are magnificent fruits of our autonomous impulses. Americans of all regions are left-leaning to the core. We have no justification for sneering at any of our self-made expressions of autonomy, to include Christian Fundamentalism. It is ours. We made it. We are it.

The strength of Christian Fundamentalism is accurately remarked but its character is not. It is a left wing phenomenon, not a right wing one.

If we take Christian Fundamentalism for a right wing phenomenon, this means that our impulses are to the left of it. And since Christian Fundamentalism is already about as far left as one can get, I would argue that if we are repelled by Christian Fundamentalism probably we are antinomian, which is all that remains left of autonomy.

(The phenomenology of antinomianism — Voltaire, French Revolution, certain German and American sects and movements, and, today, Islamic Fundamentalism — is not a pretty one and is another topic.)

Christian Fundamentalism is a serious problem, but it is a problem on the left, not on the right. Until it is seen and dealt with as a left wing problem, it will remain a chronic and more or less acute problem. This is also the case regarding Islamic Fundamentalism, by the way. Christian Fundamentalism and Islamic Fundamentalism are companion left wing deformations of authority in the horizontal direction, dancing partners in destruction if you will.

So if we see Christian Fundamentalism as a right wing phenomenon, we need an eye exam and new glasses … at the very least!

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AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA