Fantasyland, Part 6 - Political Religous Fundamentalism

Starting  out with a bit more on Protestant fundamentalism. This time from  Jill Lepore's These Truths: A History of the United States (Norton, 2018):

...Like Darwinism, the rise of the social sciences involved the abdication of other ways of knowing, and, indirectly, contributed to the rise of fundamentalism. Across newly defined academic disciplines, scholars abandoned the idea of mystery - the idea that there are things known only by God - in favor of the claim to objectivity... A theologian at the University of Chicago's divinity school defined modernism as the "the use of scientific, historical, and social methods in understanding and applying evangelical Christianity to the needs of living persons.' Increasingly, this is exactly what evangelicals who eventually identified themselves as fundamentalists found objectionable....

Chapter Nine: Of Citizens, Persons, and People; p. 354 

I read something lately about people being trapped between religious fundamentalism and atheistic fundamentalism, and I suppose humanity runs between those need to repress others and those who want their freedom of thought. The fundamentalists ignore humanity for the tenets of their idealism. I might have gotten those ideas from Sapiens. Another book I find hard to put out of my head - as I will probably find These Truths and Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland to be hard to forget. 

I have so far enjoyed Lepore more than Andersen. Lepore casts American history as a cognitive dissonance between racism and sexism on one side and the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Andersen sees us as always being nuts. The election of Donald J. Trump upped the volume on the dissonance. Andersen's prose does not hide his fear of American craziness in the way that Lepore's has about it a calmness.

By my reckoning way too many Americans now bother with reason at all, give themselves over too much to deliria of crazy imaginations, believe too many untrue and impossible things, and are losing the ability and the will to distinguish between real and unreal....

p. 320 

***

The fantasy-industrial complex invented and dominated by Americans continued to sprawl exponentially, taking over parts of every conceivable realm - politics, real estate, retail, "hospitality," lifestyle, life. We have encased ourselves in a wall-to-wall 24/7 collage of fantasy and fantastic reality... We're often unaware whether we're inside or outside of Fantasyland.

p. 430 

Ah, LAH, if you read this - does this bring back memories of Bun Lady? If she only had read this she'd know you didn't necessarily know there was a difference between truth and fantasy. 

sch

3/17/20