Progressive Religion vs. Fundamentalism: Part 1

In my recent post on the importance of progressive religion, I intimated that not all religion is the same; but I made no effort to explicitly distinguish one kind of religion from another. Since I want to address a significant challenge to progressive religion in an upcoming post or two, I think it may help first to devote a post to explaining what I mean by “progressive religion,” and how it differs from fundamentalism.


Here goes.

Some religion inspires us with hopeful visions, while some drives us with fearful warnings.

Some religion is inclusive (in the sense of encouraging its members not to make distinctions among people, even on the basis of religion), while some is exclusive (especially based on religion).

Some religion takes scientific discoveries and empirical knowledge seriously, understanding faith as offering a way of seeing this empirical whole in the light of evolving postulates about what lies beyond. And then there’s the religion that makes unyielding claims about the empirical world and fights tooth and nail against any discovery that challenges them.

Some religion is fallibilistic, while some is dogmatic. That is, some religion, even if it offers teachings and creeds, regards these as finite human efforts to grasp a truth that transcends us, such that even as we live out these creeds we must remain open to correction, to being moved by the insights of others unlike ourselves and by the practical failures of our creeds in the face of lived experience. Other religion, by contrast, regards its teachings as the standard by which truth is measured.

Some religions think we learn the most about how to treat each other when we pay empathetic attention to those around us, when we try to collectively tease wisdom out of the experiences that come from the messy business of real human relationships. Others insist that how we should treat each other is clearly and inerrantly spelled out in a book, and that the book’s teachings are infallible even in the face of the agonized cries of those who find themselves crushed by those teachings.

Some religions think God (or the transcendent more vaguely construed) self-discloses to all of us through an array of channels—inherited stories, great teachers and prophets, insightful writings, personal intuitions, moments of mystical wonder, the experience of loving and being loved—and that the task of discerning the nature of what is thus revealed should be a collective human one and should never be regarded as finished. Others insist that one centralized authority contains the definitive revelation of God, and that all of us defy God’s word if we do not put this authority’s pronouncements above all other sources of insight that may come to us.

A religion that embodies the former in each of these pairs is what I call “progressive religion.” One that embodies each of the latter I call “fundamentalism.” As described these are ideal types. Real religions may mix and match features or fall between the extremes in a range of ways.

I make no pretense of having described these types in wholly neutral and dispassionate terms. I find progressive religion appealing and fundamentalism off-putting, and my descriptions reflect this. I am not writing here as a disinterested academic, but I am writing in a way that I hope is helpful. There is, I think, a descriptive content here that I hope helps to characterize a distinction that matters to me. Progressive religion is characterized, we might say, by a spirit of seeking and openness; fundamentalism by a spirit of certainty and bifurcation.

Both can be and typically are expressed within the context of an inherited tradition that is treated with deep respect—but progressive religion regards the tradition as a resource for engaging with the world, both collectively and personally, in ways that can generate deepening wisdom—in something like the Hegelian fashion, although I don’t mean to imply by this that all religious progressives have read Hegel (or that all of Hegel’s philosophy would be endorsed by them).

The Hegelian idea, in roughest terms, is that while the deepest truths about reality cannot be directly seen with our senses or grasped with our intellects, they can nevertheless be approached through living out a worldview respectfully but critically, so that the places where the worldview “grates” against the truth become apparent, and the worldview can be refined accordingly. More profoundly, the idea is that we have no choice but to live out a worldview of one sort or another. Even when we aren’t aware that we are taking things for granted, we are. The trick is to become aware of our assumptions and, instead of simply using them as the standard whereby we criticize and condemn everyone who disagrees with us, we test their adequacy by living them out in a spirit of openness—openness to noticing where the worldview doesn’t work, and modifying it accordingly.

Progressive religion accepts this idea, explicitly or implicitly. Fundamentalism rejects it, holding instead that the central dogmas of its tradition are certain and hence not to be questioned. To question them is to question truth and so to court error. To reject them is to reject truth and to live in error. The world becomes divided between those who live in truth (the Children of Light) and those who live in error (the Children of Darkness). The mission—to spread truth and light—becomes quite readily construed as a zero-sum struggle.

At root, progressive religion is most alive wherever great weight is placed on the distinction between what one believes to be true and what is true. While progressive religion affirms the legitimacy of having beliefs, it does so while insisting on the ever-present possibility of a disparity between what one believes and what is the case. And so the deepest devotion to truth, for the progressive, is found in the acknowledgment that one could be wrong about matters of faith.

Fundamentalism doesn’t merely minimize the importance of this distinction. It denies it. Its creeds are the truth. Hence, to disagree with its creeds is to deny the truth. To fail to revere its creeds is to fail to care about the truth. Devotion to the truth, for the fundamentalist, can never be paired with skepticism about the fundamentalist’s creed.

A recurring challenge to progressive religion is that there is something about the nature of religion, even in its progressive forms, that provides succor to fundamentalism. To legitimize progressive religion is to legitimize patterns of thinking that can and sometimes do lead to extremism.

In a way, my first book, Is God a Delusion?, can be usefully seen as an effort to respond to just this sort of challenge. But in an upcoming post or two I want to consider the challenge anew, and attempt to articulate my responses to it in ways that address themes that have emerged on this blog, and in a form amenable (I hope) to fruitful discussion.