(Home Page Preface Written in 2006) "OK, what’s this book about? It’s about what’s happened to the American government lately. It’s about the disastrous decisions that government has made. It’s about the corruption that rotted the Congress. It’s about how traditional conservatism has nearly been destroyed by authoritarianism. It’s about how the “Religious Right” teamed up with amoral authoritarian leaders to push its un-democratic agenda onto the country. It’s about the United States standing at the crossroads as the next federal election approaches.
“Well,” you might be thinking, “I don’t believe any of this is true.” Or maybe, you’re thinking, “What else is new? I’ve believed this for years.” Why should a conservative, moderate, or liberal bother with this book? Why should any Republican, Independent, or Democrat click the “Whole Book” link on this page?
Because if you do, you’ll begin an easy-ride journey through some very relevant scientific studies I have done on authoritarian personalities--one that will take you a heck of a lot less time than the decades it took me. Those studies have a direct bearing on all the topics mentioned above. So if you think the first paragraph is a lot of hokum, or full of half-truths, I invite you to look at the research."
Here I reproduce two interesting sections of the book that deal with Bible literalism and Christian fundamentalism.
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Chapter Four
Authoritarian Followers and Religious Fundamentalism 1
Care to try your hand at another scale? Answer the one below, responding to
each item with anything from a -4 to a +4.
____ 1. God has given humanity a complete, unfailing guide to happiness and salvation, which must be totally followed.
____ 2. No single book of religious teachings contains all the intrinsic, fundamental truths about life.
____ 3. The basic cause of evil in this world is Satan, who is still constantly and ferociously fighting against God.
____ 4. It is more important to be a good person than to believe in God and the right religion.
____ 5. There is a particular set of religious teachings in this world that are so true, you can’t go any “deeper” because they are the basic, bedrock message that God has given humanity.
____ 6. When you get right down to it, there are basically only two kinds of people in the world: the Righteous, who will be rewarded by God, and the rest, who will not.
____ 7. Scriptures may contain general truths, but they should NOT be considered completely, literally true from beginning to end.
____ 8. To lead the best, most meaningful life, one must belong to the one, fundamentally true religion.
____ 9. “Satan” is just the name people give to their own bad impulses. There really is no such thing as a diabolical “Prince of Darkness” who tempts us.
____10. Whenever science and sacred scripture conflict, science is probably right.
____11. The fundamentals of God’s religion should never be tampered with, or compromised with others’ beliefs.
____12. All of the religions in the world have flaws and wrong teachings. There is no perfectly true, right religion.
Here are the same instructions for scoring your responses that you encountered in chapter 1 when you answered the RWA scale.
For items 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, and 11:
If you wrote down a “-4” that’s scored as a 1.
If you wrote down a “-3" that’s scored as a 2.
If you wrote down a “-2" that’s scored as a 3.
If you wrote down a “-1" that’s scored as a 4.
If you wrote down a “0" or left the item unanswered, that’s scored a 5.
If you wrote down a “+1" that’s scored as a 6.
If you wrote down a “+2" that’s scored as a 7.
If you wrote down a “+3" that’s scored as an 8.
If you wrote down a “+4" that’s scored as a 9.
For Items 2, 4, 7, 9, 10 and 12:
If you wrote down a “-4" that’s scored as a 9.
If you wrote down a “-3" that’s scored as an 8.
If you wrote down a “-2" that’s scored as a 7.
If you wrote down a “-1" that’s scored as a 6.
If you wrote down a “0" or left the item unanswered, that’s scored a 5.
If you wrote down a “+1" that’s scored as a 4.
If you wrote down a “+2" that’s scored as a 3.
If you wrote down a “+3" that’s scored as a 2.
If you wrote down a “+4" that’s scored as a 1.
Add up your twelve scores. Unless I have the all-time worst score on the SATMath test, you can’t score lower than 12, or higher than 108, no matter how you try. Intro psychology students at my Canadian university average about 50, while their parents usually land a few points higher. A nationwide sample of some 300 members of an unnamed fundamentalist Protestant church in the United States, gathered by Ted Witzig, thumped out a 93.1--the highest group score I have yet seen.2
Your famous intuition probably led you to suspect this scale has something to do with religious conservatism (especially if you read the title of this chapter). So you were wised up and should not view your score with much faith (or hope, or charity). Bruce Hunsberger and I called this the Religious Fundamentalism scale when
we developed it some years ago. We did not mean by “fundamentalism” a particular set of religious beliefs, a creed. It was clear that the mind-set of fundamentalism could be found in many faiths. Instead we tried to measure a person’s attitudes toward whatever beliefs she had, trying to identify the common underlying psychological elements in the thinking of people who were commonly called Christian fundamentalists, Hindu fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists, and Muslim fundamentalists.
We thought a fundamentalist in any of these major faiths would feel that her religious beliefs contained the fundamental, basic, intrinsic, inerrant truth about humanity and the Divine--fundamentally speaking. She would also believe this essential truth is fundamentally opposed by forces of evil that must be vigorously
fought, and that this truth must be followed today according to the fundamental, unchangeable practices of the past. Finally, those who follow these fundamental beliefs would have a special relationship with the deity.
Research has confirmed that the Religious Fundamentalism scale has validity in all the religions named. You can find some high scorers in all of them who fit the description just given. More to the point, the scale may give us a way to study the psychology of the “Religious Right” in America today.
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From pages 126-128
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C. The Bible Is Always Right, Unless... As we saw in chapter 3, you frequently find dogmatism in religion. Still, I have been amazed at how rigid religious fundamentalists can be--even to the point of dismissing what they say is the cornerstone of their lives, the Bible. I have twice given students who insisted the Bible was both a) divinely inspired and b) free of errors, contradictions and inconsistencies, the four Gospel accounts of Easter morning, laid out side by side. You never see them that way. Most people just hear one account, in church on Easter. Those who set out to read the New Testament go through the Gospels in the order Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and may well have forgotten what Matthew said when they get to Mark’s starkly different version. Thus I suspect none of my “true believers” had ever seen the narratives printed alongside one another before. I asked them to read the (literally) Gospel accounts of this, the central, defining event in their religion. Then they read the following summary I had prepared:
“There appear to be many direct contradictions in these four descriptions of the tomb scene. Who actually encountered the risen Jesus in the garden? John says it was just Mary Magdalen. Matthew says it was Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary,” and according to Mark and Luke, neither Mary Magdalene nor any other person actually saw Jesus in the garden. Did Mary Magdalene recognize Jesus when she encountered him? John says no, but Matthew says yes. Did the women tell anyone what happened in the garden? Mark explicitly says they did not; Luke and John explicitly say they told the apostles. Was it light when Mary Magdalen came to the tomb (as Mark, Matthew and Luke say), or dark (as John says)? How many ”men in white”/angels were there: one (Mark and Matthew) or two (Luke and John)? Did Jesus let people hold onto him? Matthew says yes, John says no. ..Who actually went to the tomb? (All four accounts disagree.) Which apostles went to the garden? According to Luke, only Peter went; but John says Peter and the “beloved disciple” both went; and Mark and Matthew make no mention of Peter (or any other apostle) going to the garden. Was there a great earthquake, as Matthew says? How could Mark, Luke and John all ignore “a great earthquake”? Were there Roman guards? Matthew says yes, but the others do not mention them at all.”
I then offered each subject space to explain her position on the Bible under various headings. The first possibility was “There are, in fact, no contradictions or inconsistencies in the four accounts.” Other possibilities attributed the contradictions and inconsistencies to human error in translation, etcetera, or to some of the evangelists getting details wrong, or to the whole thing being a myth.
Most of the fundamentalists stuck by their guns and insisted no contradictions or inconsistencies existed in the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, no matter what one might point out. I call that dogmatism. Furthermore a curious analogy kept popping up in their defense of this seemingly indefensible stand. Many of them said the evangelists were like witnesses to an automobile accident, each of whom saw the event from a different place, and therefore gave a slightly different account of what had happened. I’m ready to bet they picked up this “analysis-by-analogy” in Sunday school, or some such place. Like the arguments against evolution, you can tell they just swallowed this “explanation” without thinking because it is, in fact, an admission that contradictions and inconsistencies do exist. The “different angles”story just explains how the contradictions got there.
Ultimately the true believers were saying, “I believe so strongly that the Bible is perfect that there’s nothing, not even the Bible itself, that can change my mind.” If that seems like an enormous self-contradiction, put it on the list. We are dealing with very compartmentalized minds. They’re not really interested in coming to grips with what’s actually in the Bible so much as mounting a defense of what they want to believe about the Bible --come Hell or Noah’s high water. 20
We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of dogmatism to the fundamentalist, even though it sometimes seems to surpass understanding. As noted in the last chapter, it takes no effort to be dogmatic, and you don’t need to know very much to insist you’re right and nothing can possibly change your mind. As well, dogmatism gives the joy and comfort of certainty, which fundamentalists cherish.
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