by Robert W. McDonald

Created on: December 23, 2009

The identity of the party responsible for “putting the hate in Christianity” can be expressed in two words: Fundamentalist Christians.  While many of us will accept the validity of this identification to be bordering on self-evident, this essay will present arguments supporting this contention.

First of all, we must distinguish between a “Biblical Literalist” and a “Christian Fundamentalist.”

John Dominic Crossan, arguably one of the 20th Century’s most distinguished scholars of Christianity, describes a Biblical Literalist as someone who will go to extraordinary intellectual efforts to interpret the Bible as being word-by-word literally true, but yet will admit that “… Jesus as the ‘Lamb of God’ does not mean that ‘Mary had a little lamb…’” On the other hand, he defines a Fundamentalist Christian as someone who takes the Bible literally but will also say that “… if you don’t take the Bible literally, then you can’t a Christian…” (See Note 1, below) Based on these insights, we may now define a Fundamentalist Christian as a Biblical Literalist who demands that everyone else interpret the Bible exactly as he/she does, or else!

The Fundamentalists claim that they are only carrying out the “Great Commission,” that section of Matthew where it says to “… Go ye therefore…” Although most of us, with myself at the top of the list, do not claim to be Biblical scholars; there appears to be nothing in the scriptures to indicate that Jesus of Nazareth and the Twelve set a precedent by going around waving scrolls in peoples faces while starting every sentence with “The TORAH says…”

Try as we might, it is also difficult to recall specific instances of a “Fundamentalist Hindu Yogi,” a “Fundamentalist Buddhist,” or even a “Fundamentalist Navajo Medicine Man” appearing on some neglected cable television network on a daily basis and then launching into a hour-long diatribe against “godless secular humanists,” “evil-lutionists,” the Democratic Party, and other such “tools of the Antichrist;” punctuated by pleas for more money and prayers for the acquittal of someone who has proudly admitted to shooting an unarmed abortionist in the back.

Fundamentalist Christians will immediately protest that they are the “victims”

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