As a reformed god-hating liberal who once found the religious convictions of the Southern Baptist convention too moderate, I have raged with anger over the last 36 hours. I've read diary after diary, comment after comment, of people expressing similar anger, but I've noticed a trend that it is rage without focus, or focused on entirely the wrong subset of people.
After the break I'll try to explain, using my own time as a fundamentalist, what mistakes we are making in trying to understand them, and lay out a plan on how we can divide them and contain their extremism-and keep them from ruining our great country.
Rule #1 about fundamentalists:
THEY ARE HOPELESS.
You cannot reason with them. You cannot negotiate with them. They live in a world of sharp absolutes and recieve guidance in a world of mirrors and echoes, all converging to the same groupthink frequency. Their main form of socialization and outside interaction is at the workplace, where they perceive themselves as god's ambassadors to a hedonist, sinful world full of people wanting to be saved by them, and their fellowships, where the intensity of group prayer sessions and racous praise and worship is used to make the swallowing of fundamentalist indoctrination more easier on the brain.
I spent almost two years enstranged from my lesbian sister-who is also heavily religious-by attempting to brand her as a sinful, confused person going to hell. My own sister, who I have always loved dearly, and in a confrontation that was driven, at the time, by my love for her and my desire to see her rehabilitated.
Fundamentalism can take the most rational, intelligent people and find ways to bend and twist their beliefs to conform with the groupthink. You will not be able to change their minds about what they believe at any-macro or personal-level.
Rule #2:
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A COGNITIVELY DISSONANT FUNDAMENTALIST.
Cognitive dissonance occurs when your mind can't believe what it is happening. Fundamentalists have created a world that is totally disconnected with reality, but creates a faith-based explanation for the real world that surrounds them. Things like spiritual warfare and the imminent specter of the endtimes-both made popular through the "Left Behind" and "Into/Piercing the Darkness" books provide a way for the brain to reconcile the disconnect between their faith-created world and reality.
Their reality is a perfectly functional-if totally impossible for a sane person to understand-entity. It contains no flaws and is a fully continuous space without any gaps that might let dissonance sink in.
Fundamentalits aren't turned by one day having their supposed cognitive dissonance break. You have to shine the light of truth and start with the deprogramming of the reality, bit by bit, layer by later. This is done by disconnecting them with their congregation, and starving them of the groupthink they need to feed on in order to preserve their alternate reality.
HOW CAN WE BEAT THEM.
There is a way to remove them from the political calculus, however. And that's to use their own beliefs against them.
The first method to beat them is to use their idelogical purity. We have to work, at the race-by -race level, to dissociate Eepubllican candidates with the faith-based reality that fundamentalists hold dear. It is important to note that this will mean going negative early and often-we find material their voting records, or their personal history. We will make it a huge deal, smear the shit out of them, leaving them with a fractured base that will either not turn out, or turn to a third party candidate that meets their very strict demand for ideological purity. Either way, we shatter their base, while losing nothing of our core constituency.
Next, we have to challenge the supposed faith of their candidates, and portray them when we can as equally secular to the other guy. I ask you-what if there had been a 527 that had taken the gloves off and ran ads in swing states documenting the ways that Bush wasn't a Christian? It would have made the Swift Boat Vets look like a sideshow compared to the media circus that would follow. HE'S NOT A CHRISTIAN-we can use this. His life record and actions in office reek of a faithless man who is at best backslidden.
The left needs to learn and liberally use fundamentalist code words (I just did, with 'backslidden') to communicate a message to the fundamentalist base that this isn't the guy you think he is. The right has co-opted the fundamentalist base by using wedge issues and codewording, and we can do the same thing back to them. Our goal isn't to win them over though, it's to maintain our progressive agenda while clearing the fog of faith by communicating to the religious right in the most effective means possible.
Finally-and you're going to love this one-we have to disaffect and disgrace the groups that are producing new fundamentalists. In town by town-principality by principality, if you will (again, learn and use their codewords), we have to expose the organizations and their radical viewpoints and shatter their churches by unvieling their corruption. We have to rescue people before they get in too deep and deprogram people who do get in that far and want out. The end goal is splitting the religious right between good people of faith who go to church and are connected with the rest of the world-and want no part in the "fundmentalist agenda" (COIN THIS TERM).
I have burned with anger ever since Tuesday night, where I saw the very people who almost ruined my life come one step closer to runing the lives of every single free-thinking man, woman, and child in the United States. Everyone needs to understand that this is what it's all about-a total war against secularism, equal rights, and free speech, art, and thought.
We must fight against the Dominionist segment of the GOP with the same kind of head-on tenacity that we might the corpratists in the GOP (which we do well). The end result should be one of containment-where we cut off the sane segment of the relgious right from the insane one, and then exercise a moderate agenda respective of the sane people of faith and secularists both, and to use this "coalition of the people that aren't batshit crazy" to govern the country with.
It's going to be one hell of a fight. For the sake of the world, however, it is one the people of America must win. There is no aid coming from other countries, and we can't simply just hold them off and hope that they either die off or get marginalized by demographics. We have to fight them head on-and we can win, and if we understand their reality and manipulate them through that reality, we can do it in a matter of years.