Fundamentalism and the New Conservative Evangelical Identity

If we tend to hold to the past and lack the tools of logic, what is left but for a person of real or perceived significance to hold the whole thing together by force of personality? There you have it !

I was saved in a fundamental church , brought my boys up in fundamental schools(BJU/Clearwater) and both graduated and married girls in these collages with like backgrounds. My older son has taken his family into a large SBC church and my other son is considering a move from our local Fundamental Church. Observing and participating in the fundamental movement for the last almost 50 yrs I also am ready to go…not because of the sins of a few “popes” but because churches and the (remaining) schools are still bent on perpetrating the same root principles that lead to failure.

• We continue to teach the “papacy” of one shepherd and a flock of sheeple. These men have the work named after them, no not on the door but we all know that is “John Doe’s” church. The sheeple are never allowed to even question the “shepherd.
• The Deacons are gathered as some sort of “board” the one man fronts as giving authority of the church.These men are chosen for their submissive spirit which is fine because the position is not one of authority, These are the men who know the Pastor has a drinking problem for 2 yrs , but are still because who can question “God’s Man” ?
• The collages support this distorted type of church leadership because then they only have to convince one man to send their youth their way.
• Evangelist preach this structure or do not get invited back….
• Our God is a jealous God and will not allow it for long and the field is littered with his turning them over…but we see it as something to forget or brush under the rug…so sad.
• These men handpick men without leadership gifts that do not threaten their personality hold on the flock to their staff or worse bring in their family to staff the church.
• Laymen with leadership gifts are seen as threats and pushed out.
• Because these men “are” the church when they leave or pass the Church usually dies because a good expositor just cant compete with these over the top personalities that are long on entertainment and shallow on substance.
• These services are usually marked with anger and self righteousness with very little joy..or praise.
• These men see collaboration as a weakness and micro manage every ministry…Good men will not stay long on these staffs.
• The men love to preach leadership examples out of the old testament utilizing a wrong type.
• The “priesthood” of the believer is seldom preached as it conflicts with the Sheep and shepherd vision
• Some of these men really believe that the leadership gifts are restricted to ordained staff regardless that they are 21 right out of school.

I do believe the SBC has gotten on top of this issue in the past years and have seen some Churches really grow and plant like kind. I just feel like while we call ourselves “fundamentalist” we have propagated a structure that is not seen or promoted in the scriptures and far from the image of one body with many parts. The one man one church was not on the scene until the second century as a way of efficiency by Rome.

Dr. McCune

What I’m getting at is simple, and hopefully we’re starting to go in the right direction already. More or less, since our movement was born with a well-earned distrust of academia, one side effect is that we have less of the skills that the academics at least historically used to analyze texts and ideas. The biggest flaw I see, and regrettably consistently, is that various genetic fallacies are used as if they meant something—the ad hominem, guilt by association, and the like.

To draw a regrettably real but thankfully marginal picture, look at just about any KJVO advocate’s writing. To get to a KJVO position (as opposed to “preferred” and the like), you’ve got to argue that not only is the TR different from the eclectic/Alexandrian text, but that one text family was deliberately corrupted. The rub is that nobody has found evidence that anybody deliberately corrupted any text family.

Hence, the personal attacks fly hot and heavy in KJVO writings because there is no legitimate evidence for the position that the Alexandrian texts were deliberately corrupted. I would argue that instead of debating KJVO advocates on “was James a closet homosexual or ardent Christian?” and the like, we simply ought to throw a flag and say “genetic fallacy, only proves you can not or will not make a real argument.”

It is worth noting, along the same lines, that KJVO churches have some of the worst reputations for domineering leadership—it’s not an accident, but an almost necessary consequence of accepting pathetic logic from the pulpit.

You can see the same kind of thing in the “worship wars” over music, where few seem to make much of an appeal to Scripture, but the attacks flow fast and furious. “That music reminds me of what I heard when I walked by a singles bar”, “that music puts me to sleep”, and the like. Again, absent a good exegesis, the dominant personality prevails.

Put gently, I’m not getting to Aristotle’s categories of valid vs. invalid syllogisms or anything that takes much advanced training—it’s simply throwing the flag when basic fallacies are used. Make sense?

Bert:

Thanks. Yes, I understand what you say, and it makes sense.