The Authoritarians

Fundamentalism scale). They racked up an average score of 86.6 on the measure—discernibly lower but still in the same ballpark as the American fundamentalists’ 93.1 in Witzig’s study.

Looked at the other way, 72 percent of the Christians who scored highly on the fundamentalism measure qualified as “Barna evangelicals.”^[8] So call them what you will, most evangelicals are fundamentalists according to our measure, and most Christian fundamentalists are evangelical s.^[9] Whether you are talking about evangelicals or talking about Christian fundamentalists, you are largely talking about the same people.

Some high religious fundamentalists turn up in all the faiths represented in my samples, including Hinduism, Islam and Judaism. Within Christianity, I always find some Catholics scoring highly on the Religious Fundamentalism scale, a few Anglicans post big numbers, some Lutherans ring the bell, and so on. But in study after study the high scores pile up far more often in the conservative Protestant denominations than anywhere else, among Baptists, Mennonites, Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Alliance Church, and so on. It bears repeating that this is a generalization, and some Baptists, etcetera score quite low in fundamentalism. But if you want to make a safe wager, see what odds you can get betting that these conservative sects will score higher on the Religious Fundamentalism scale than the other major Christian groups.

2. Fundamentalism and Right-Wing Authoritarianism

The first thing you need to know about religious fundamentalists, in case you haven’t inferred it already, is that they usually score very highly on the RWA scale. ^{[10], [11]} A solid majority of them are authoritarian followers. The two traits, authoritarianism and fundamentalism, go together so well that nearly everything I have said about high RWAs in the previous chapters also applies to high Religious Fundamentalists.

Since authoritarianism can produce fundamentalism if one grows up submissively in a religiously conservative family, and (conversely), fundamentalism can promote authoritarianism with its emphases on submission to religious authority, dislike of out-groups, sticking to the straight and narrow, and so on, one immediately wonders which is the chicken and which is the egg.

The evidence indicates authoritarianism is more basic. The RWA scale correlates better than the Religious Fundamentalism scale does with acceptance of government injustices, hostility toward homosexuals, willingness to persecute whomever the government targets, and most other things. (The big exception naturally comes when one raises distinctly religious issues.) So the problem’s not so much that some people are fundamentalists, but that fundamentalists so definitely tend to be authoritarian followers. But as I just said, religious fundamentalism does promote authoritarianism in some ways. And you can certainly see the influence of right-wing authoritarianism in many things that religious fundamentalists do.

3. Fundamentalism as a Template for Prejudice

Let me ask you a personal question: Who are you? What makes up your identity? How would you describe yourself?

You would probably list your gender fairly quickly, your age, your nationality, marital status and your job —unless you are a student, in which case you’d say you’re poor and going deeply into debt. Would you mention a religious affiliation? You almost certainly would if you are a high fundamentalist. Furthermore, except for converts, this has probably been true of fundamentalists for all of their lives. They report that their parents placed a lot of emphasis on their religious identification as they were growing up. For example, “You are a Baptist,” or “We belong to the Assembly of God.” It would have become one of the main ways they thought of themselves. By comparison, they say their gender and race were stressed much less.

What’s the effect of emphasizing the family’s religious affiliation to a child? Well, by creating this category of what the family is, you instantly create the category of people who are not that, who are different. You’re laying down an in-group versus out-group distinction. Even if you never say a nasty word about other religions, the enormous human tendency to think in ethnocentric terms will create a preference for “people like me.” Throw in some gratuitous nasty words about Jews, Muslims, Methodists, atheists, and so on, and you’ve likely sown the seeds of religious prejudice in a four-year old. Perhaps more importantly in the long run, you’ve given your child early training in the wonderful world of “Us versus Them”—training that may make it easier for him to acquire racial, sexual, and ethnic prejudices later on. ^[12]

There can be little doubt that, as adults, Christian fundamentalists harbor a pointed dislike of other religions. Here are some items from my Religious Ethnocentrism scale that fundamentalists tend to agree with.

Our country should always be a Christian country, and other beliefs should be ignored in our public institutions.

Nonchristian religions have a lot of weird beliefs and pagan ways that Christians should avoid having any contact with.

All people may be entitled to their own religious beliefs, but I don’t want to associate with people whose views are quite different from my own.

At the same time, fundamentalists tend to disagree with:

If there is a heaven, good people will go to it no matter what religion they belong to, if any.

You can trust members of all religions equally; no one religion produces better people than any other does.

People who belong to different religions are probably just as nice and moral as those who belong to mine.

Yep, it’s Us versus Them. Religious prejudice does not draw as much attention or produce as much hatred in North America as it does in (say) the Middle East and southern Asia, but it’s still dynamite looking for a place to explode because it’s so often accompanied by the self-righteousness that releases aggression. And it runs deep in Christian fundamentalists because religion is so important to them.

News that they score relatively highly on racial prejudice scales often stuns white fundamentalists. They will usually reply, “You must be mistaken. We’re not prejudiced. Why, we accept black people in our church.” And indeed, if you ask a white fundamentalist if he’d rather spend an evening with a black member of his church or a white atheist, he will almost certainly choose the former.

But fundamentalists still hold more racial prejudices than most people—a fact known to social scientists for over fifty years. White churches were open to just white folks for generations in America, and many pastors found justification in the Bible for both slavery and the segregation that followed the demise of slavery. Vestiges of this remain in fundamentalist religions. Bill McCartney, the founder of the evangelical men’s movement called Promise Keepers, tells the story of what happened on a nation-wide speaking tour when he finished up his stock speech with a call for racial reconciliation:

“There was no response—nothing…In city after city, in church after church, it was the same story—wild enthusiasm while I was being introduced, followed by a morgue-like chill as I stepped away from the microphone.^[13]

Ironically, most fundamentalists say they believe in “the brotherhood of all mankind.” “We are all God’s children.” “Jesus loves you”—whoever you are. It says so in their