PalMD at denialism blog asks a great question: Why is the faith of creationists so weak?
The very concept of faith is that an individual can endure in his belief no matter the lack of empirical evidence or the attitudes of his neighbors. The individual in question is capable of considering ideas with which he disagrees, though he does so through his lens of faith and will not necessarily agree with them. That is to be wholly respected, because it represents commitment as well as open-mindedness.
The goal of creationists, however, is not to live their lives in commitment to their personal faith. Their goal is to impose their beliefs – not their faith – on others. This stems both from an obvious desire for social control, but, on a more basic matter, on a deep psychological unease. It is symptomatic of fundamentalism, no matter what specific form it takes or from what religion it derives.
Fundamentalism arises in a traditionalist culture when that culture undergoes extraordinary change that dramatically alters its social status. The culture, due to its blind adherence to tradition, is unable to adapt to changing conditions, and turns inward. Its adherents seem to think, “We tried to do God’s will, but God abandoned us. This cannot mean that we were wrong, but that we were insufficiently devoted to the dogma of our religion. The only obvious response is to become even more dogmatic and extreme in our beliefs, and impose them on society to prevent further change and draw back the change that has occurred.”
The world has seen a modern example of this in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, which was the product of both European colonialism and its downfall, and social liberalism. The Taliban perfectly epitomize fundamentalism in their extremist beliefs and practices; they also epitomize the dead end that fundamentalism represents, because imposing God’s will on the world turned their adopted homeland,
Christian fundamentalism emerged in the American south following the Civil War. It was a direct response to the south’s defeat in that war and, in particular, the abolition of slavery as a legal institution in the
Creationism is not distinct from Christian fundamentalism, and shares the same origin in racial hatred: the core purpose of creationist ideology was to reject the implications of biological racial equality inherent in Darwinian theory.
Having lost their racially biased social system, which they believed had been ordained by God, the emerging fundamentalists believed that they had failed to be sufficiently devoted to the dogma of their religion, and reacted by forming a movement that would impose their beliefs on the world to halt or reverse the spread of civil rights legislation. Fundamentalism and creationism have remained rooted in this racist ideology ever since, even though the public pronouncements of adherents have changed over time to avoid unwelcome social stigma – to hide their true motives from outsiders.
Fundamentalism is therefore never about faith, but about anxiety over the insufficiency of faith. The fundamentalist is at the most basic level a bundle of Freudian defense mechanisms: denial, projection, reaction formation, etc. Like any individual experiencing such anxiety, the fundamentalist’s primary option is to avoid or stamp out the things that cause him anxiety. As a movement, this involves removing evolutionary theory from science classrooms, barring homosexuals from legal marriage, opposing immigration reform, using any method available to undermine reproductive rights, etc. All the central issues of the modern fundamentalist movement in
Of course, not every member of the fundamentalist movement is a confirmed racist, homophobe, or misogynist. Their leaders are, however, and, by using the mechanisms of religion, they have deluded their followers by appealing to the ever more irrelevant concept of “faith”. These leaders, and their deluded followers, continue to engage in a program that is designed not to deal with the real world, but to block it out so that they can live in a world of fantasy. On a social level, they are enacting the very same behaviors that an individual experiencing extreme anxiety would enact.
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