Church Voices

Here is Frank Schaefer’s latest column. In it he lumps the Pope, radical Islamists, Left Behind readers, Orthodox Jews, and Francis Schaefer together under the label of “fundamentalist”.

I’ve commented before that the word “fundamentalist” has undergone a slow evolution in meaning. The word first came about as a result of a specific series of writings in the early 1900s and was a very precise term used to describe a specific set of beliefs and was generally used in a self-identifying manner. As time wore on it became less precise and came to mean simply conservative Christians. As more time wore on it became an even fuzzier term and acquired a negative connotation. After that negative connotation was solidified the word “fundamentalist” became an insult to be slung at anyone who the slinger disagreed with. In this way it became code that the subject of the slur is not only wrong, but a horrible human being to boot.

And now we have this latest mutation of the term “fundamentalist”. Frank Schaefer has, in effect, defined anyone who is “certain” as to the veracity of their belief as a “fundamentalist”. Of course, his philosophy of ambiguity fails where every explicitly agnostic philosophy fails. For all his deriding of “absolutist dedication to unchangeable “certainties” he himself embraces with absolutist dedication the unchangeable certainty that he is uncertain. It gets even more absurd the deeper we look into Frank Schaefer’s life. He deliberately walked away from the worldview of his father, that is he is so certain of uncertainty that he made a major decision concerning his views of the nature of the universe, a decision that impacted his life to the point that it changed the people he knows, the types of writings he writes, and also most likely the lifestyle he leads. What are the chances that he would be writing for the San Francisco Gate if he hadn’t made this decision?

And of course that brings us to the final irony. Because Frank Schaefer has embraced with “absolute certainty” his particular worldview it makes him one of the very fundamentalists he criticizes so severely.

More commentary on this topic can be found here.