TOXINS IN THE MOTHER TONGUE : A Novelist Responds to a Bout of Censorship by Taking Back Morality, and the Language, From the Narrow Definitions of Fundamentalists

1. Censored

I was invited, a few years back, to speak to 60 or so high school English students in a small town neither geographically nor demographically far from Sweet Home, Oregon--from whence the Oregon Citizens Alliance and its now nationally famous, selective-Leviticus-quoting anti-homosexual agenda sprang into the national headlines. I was buried in work at the time, but I chose to visit anyhow, when the English teacher who’d invited me mentioned that her students were being forced to read a version of my first novel, “The River Why,” from which hundreds of words had been purged by a team of parents armed with indelible black felt pens.

My novel had already been assigned, the teacher explained, and her class was halfway through it, when the mother of a student happened to pick the book up and discover my protagonist’s use of language. By no stretch of the imagination or Bible could that language be considered “obscene.” Using the Hollywood rating system, I believe my novel would receive a PG-13--and I’m embarrassed to add that a G would be more likely than an R. The passages this mother nevertheless proceeded to underline, Xerox and distribute to all comers at a PTA meeting nearly caused the book to be banned outright. But at this same meeting, a couple of brave English teachers stood up and tenaciously defended the morality of my novel’s overall aims, and a compromise--which of course satisfied neither side--was reached. The book was called back from the students, duly purged by the parents, reassigned and, as some sort of finale (and, I think, a small act of teacherly revenge upon the vigilantes), I was invited to visit.

The first thing I did upon arriving at the school was paw through an excised copy to see just how black my prose had been deemed to be--and more than a few pages, it turned out, looked rather as if Cajuns had cooked them. But what interested me far more than the quantity of black marks was the unexpected difficulty of the whole censorship endeavor. Hard as these parents had tried to Clorox my prose, a myopic focus on “nasty words” at the expense of attention to narrative flow had resulted in a remarkably self-defeating arbitrariness. They’d taken care, for instance, to spare their big, strapping logging-town teen-agers my protagonist’s dislike of the Army Corps of Engineers by converting the phrase “God damn dams” to “God xxxx dams.” Yet when the same protagonist, one Gus Orviston, told a story about an inch-and-a-half-long scorpion his kid brother lost inside his fly-fishing-crazed family’s house, not a word was blackened out of Gus’ surmise that the lonely creature had ultimately “found and fallen in love with one of my father’s mayfly imitations and died of lover’s nuts trying to figure out how to screw the thing.” Along similar lines, Gus was allowed, in a scene when his lady-love rejected him, to describe himself as a “blubbering Sasquatch . . . my beard full of lint, my teeth yellow, my fly open and undershorts showing there the same color as my teeth, and thick green boogers clogging both my nostrils.” Yet when he attempted moments later to describe the bottom of a river as “the place where the slime and mudsuckers and fish-shit live,” student innocence had to be protected by the prophylactic “fish-xxxx.”

The pattern grew obvious: While my protagonist had been allowed to piss, puke and fornicate, to insult door-to-door evangelists and even to misread and reject the Bible with impunity, every time he tried to use an old-fashioned four-letter word--even the innocuous likes of “hell,” “damn” or “ass”--down came the indelible markers. Some kind of “suitable-for-mixed-company” politeness was, then, what my censors were out to impose. It always seems to dumbfound and offend the promulgators of such cleanlinesses when the makers and defenders of literature declare even purges like theirs to be not just ineffective but dangerous.

The students’ reactions to being censored in this way were mild compared to the teachers’ reactions and to my own. Most of them considered it an embarrassment--but less of an embarrassment, probably, than a dozen other inescapable facets of high school, small-town and family life. When I read to them the single most censored scene--an expose of the greed and stupidity of two drunken fishermen--with the missing words restored, the students, on a show of hands, unanimously preferred their drunks to sound like drunks, not Sunday-school teachers. They also agreed unanimously that the purge had been utterly ineffective. But most of them, I felt, were no more able than the parent-censors themselves to perceive any genuine danger in the laundering of their curriculum or literature.

A parable on the danger:

When I was a kid and picked raspberries for pocket money, some of the teen-age boys in the fields used to defy the heat, boredom and row-bosses (most of whom were staid Christian housewives) by regaling us with a series of formulaic, ad-libbed yarns they called “The Adventures of One-Eyed Dirk.” To a casual listener, One-Eyed Dirk’s were some of the dullest adventures ever endured. We pickers listened with bated breath, though, knowing that it was actually our teen raconteurs, not Dirk, who were having the adventure. The trick to a One-Eyed Dirk story was to juxtapose strategic verbs and modifiers with names of common objects in a way that enabled you, through the magic of metaphor, to spout pure analogical pornography within the hearing of everyone, yet to proclaim your literal innocence if confronted by an offended adult. An example might go: “Stunned by the size of the musk melons she’d offered him, One-Eyed Dirk groped through his own meager harvest, found the bent green zucchini, sighed at the wormhole in the end, but, with a shy smile, drew it out and thrust it slowly toward her . . . .”

Silly as this kind of thing may be, it underscores the fact that there is virtually nothing a would-be censor can do to guarantee the purity of language, because it is not just words that render language impure. Even “dirty” words tend to be morally neutral until placed in a context--and it is the individual human imagination, more than individual words, that gives a context its moral or immoral twist. One-Eyed Dirk’s G-rated zucchinis and wing nuts and valve jobs drive home the point that a bored kid out to tell an off-color yarn can do it with geometry symbols, nautical flags or two rocks and a stick if he wants. The human imagination was designed (by its Designer, if you like) to make rapid-fire, free-form, often-preposterous connections between shapes, words, colors, ideas, desires, sounds. This is its weakness, but also its wondrous strength. The nature of the imagination itself is, at bottom, why organized censorship never works. And it is also why every ferociously determined censorship effort sooner or later escalates into fascistic political agendas, burnings at the stake, dunking-chairs, gulags, pogroms and other literal forms of purge. Obviously, the only fail-safe way to eliminate impurities from human tongues, minds and cultures is to eliminate human life itself.

2. A Liberal Inconsistency

The censors of my novel achieved a laughable inconsistency by zeroing in on “four-letter words” and letting the narrative imagery ride. But there seems to me to be a culturally accepted yet comparable inconsistency practiced by some of our most respected publications. Scores of nationally important newspapers and magazines refuse to print some of the very words purged from my novel by small-town parents belonging to the Oregon Citizens Alliance. The national publications characterize their own refusal as “editorial policy.” The same publications characterize the Alliance parents’ refusal as “religious fanaticism” or “fascism.”

How to work it out?

We must begin, I think, by admitting that an editorial policy is, in fact, a kind of fascism. In the litigious context of today’s censorship wars, the admirable editorial gentility of, say, a William Shawn is, unfortunately, an indefensible inconsistency. I’m reminded of Austrian novelist Heimito von Doderer’s lines: “Weapons that we have not loaded are forced into our hands. And still we fire the shot.” Anyone who believes that censorship tends toward fascism is logically forced to admit that the urbane Mr. Shawn used to unwittingly duplicate the small-town vigilantes’ “fascistic tendencies” by refusing to print the “s” or “f”- words. And those who can’t accept this--those who choose to believe that such a word in Shawn’s New Yorker would have served no compelling purpose, would have offended many readers and would have cost the publication subscription money--must also admit that there is no compelling reason for small-town parents not to wade through their children’s school libraries eliminating “offensive” words and “non-compelling” books.

I am not suggesting that all periodicals and newspapers must print such words. I am suggesting that the average citizen’s desire to improve the quality of language or art is born, in rural Oregon as it is in Manhattan, of an increasingly desperate concern for the health of the culture; that, given the rampant decay of the quality of American life, this concern is not about to leave us; that big-city editors, small-town parents, gay artists, unemployed loggers, Baptist preachers and working novelists express their desperation in different ways; and that we are united--and should, I think, be humbled--by our own inconsistencies.

But, as Krishna tells the reluctant archer, Arjuna, in the Bhagavad Gita, we also have our own individual dharmas to follow. Loggers need trees to remain loggers; preachers need full pews and offering plates; and writers need unexpurgated bookstores, libraries and lexicons. When Arjuna balked on the eve of battle, seeing that the opposing army included beloved old teachers, relatives and friends, Krishna told him that our hopes are vain and our labours futile till we see ourselves one with the Maker of the million faces. But Krishna also advised that, with this Oneness at heart, Arjuna should go forth and play his archer’s role to the best of his devastating ability. That said, I feel that I--as a novelist engaged in the ongoing fight for every writer’s and reader’s freedom--must now do my best to destroy, in argument, even a few beloved old teachers, relatives and friends.

3. The Morality of Literature

Ever since the advent of the printing press, there have been readers who slip from enthusiasm for a favorite text into the belief that the words in that text embody truth: do not just symbolize it, but literally embody it. Not till the past few decades, though, has an alliance of American “conservative Christians” declared that this slip is, in fact, the true Christian religion, that a single bookful of words is Truth, and that this Truth should become the sole basis of the nation’s political, legal and cultural life. The growing clout of this faction does not change the theological aberrance of its stance: Fundamentalists deify the written word in a way that--in light of every Scripture-based Wisdom Tradition in the world, including Christianity’s 2,000-year-old own--is not just naive. It is idolatrous. Words in books can remind us of truth, and occasionally help awaken us to it. But in themselves words are just paint, and writers are just painters--Old Testament and Gospel writers, bhakti and Sufi saints, Tibetan lamas and Zen masters included. There are, of course, crucial differences between Scripture and belles-lettres, and between inspired and merely inventive prose. But the authors of both write with human hands, and in human tongues. Let’s not overestimate the power of literature.

Let’s not underestimate it either. As readers we are asked on Page One to lay our hand upon the back of an author’s as he or she begins to paint a world. If the author’s strokes somehow repel or betray our trust, if our concentration is lax or if we’re biased or closed in some way, then no hand-in-hand magic can occur. But when a great word-painter is read with reciprocally great concentration and trust, an incredible thing happens. First, the painter’s hand disappears. Then so does our own. Till there is only the living world of the painting.

This disappearance, the way we lose ourselves in the life of a story, is, I believe, the greatest truth in any literature, be it discursive or dramatic, sacred or secular. It is at any rate the greatest describable truth, because for the duration of the disappearance we possess no I with which to describe anything outside the text in which we’re lost. Like all great truths, it is simultaneously a sacrifice (of the reader’s ego) and a resurrection (of the world, the characters and the ideas in the text). And like all great truths, it is not brought about by any kind of mental computations upon literal meanings of sentences or words. All that’s required is a willing immersion of imagination and mind in the dynamic pulse and flow of written language.

In light of this great truth, the most valid form of censorship is that practiced by authors themselves. It is the duty of all writers to scrupulously destroy or revise any or all writing that fails to let them vanish into the life of their own language. What authors are morally obligated to censor from their work is their own incompetence. Nothing more, nothing less. Simple as it sounds, it keeps most of us more than busy. Ezra Pound was quoted as saying, “Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of literature.” If, in other words, a story requires that its writer create a mountain and further requires that this mountain be imposing, the immoral mountain is not the one with the pair of unmarried hikers copulating on a remote slope. It is the mountain that fails to be imposing. The “sole morality of literature” demands that an author contemplate his peak till frozen clouds begin to swirl round its summit; till the bones of lost climbers and mountain goats appear deep in its crevasses; till its ice and stone mass haunts and daunts us like a cold moon rising not in some safe distance but from the scree at our very feet.

And the same goes--with all due apologies to literary inquisitors everywhere--for the imposing penis. This is not to say that all penises are, according to Pound’s dictum, moral. Indeed, a gratuitously shocking penis, an extraneous-to-our-story penis, a hey-look-at- me-for-the-sake-of-nothing- but-me penis, however imposing, is literarily immoral (that is, incompetent), because by jarring the reader from the narrative or argumentative flow into a mood of “What’s this stupid penis doing here?” the author has undermined the greatest truth of his tale: i.e. our ability to immerse ourselves in it. But once the dramatic demands of the story itself have requested of its author an imposing penis, it is the one-pointed, apoplectic-veined archetype, the one that has us crossing imaginary legs before we know it (or opening them, as the literary case may be), that is the moral penis, and it is the church, quasi-religious political cult or government agency that seeks to zip a zipper over it that is immoral.

“But how could the deletion of male members, filthy language, perversion, sadomasochism, sexual violence and so on ever be wrong? Why, in God’s name, shouldn’t we censor literature, art and human behavior itself in order to safeguard the purity of our children and our culture?” These are the fundamentalist questions--the Helms, Falwell and Robertson questions. Those who ask them seem to some of us to pride themselves on their amnesia, considering how recently the likes of Stalin, Hitler, McCarthy and Khomeini have asked the same sort of questions. But it’s a widespread amnesia. So here are two more answers to the questions--one civil and American, one literary and Christian. First the civil:

All citizens of this country possesses a constitutional right to detest the work of any writer or artist they choose to detest--and to criticize that writer or artist, in public and in private, in the most scathing language they are able to devise. I, to cite the handiest possible example, found the few pages of Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho” that I was able to read to be as crassly sensationalistic and literarily incompetent, despite a glib facility with sentence-making, as anything I’ve ever read. But to say that much satisfies me. And it’s all the fun the Constitution allows: To carry my disgust further, to try to summon the outrage, compose the propaganda, induce the paranoia and generate the political clout that would let me and my ideological clones ban or purge one overpaid hack is simply not the way that people in this tenuously free country long ago agreed to do things.

The old Irish bards, when asked to recite certain stories, would sometimes say to their audience: “ ‘Tis an evil tale for telling. I canna’ make it.” And hearing this, their listeners would request a different tale. I believe Ellis, and Americans in general, are dying for a dose of this bardic wisdom. Yet sickening stories are an unavoidable byproduct of a sick culture, and a crucial diagnostic tool for anyone who seeks a cure. Writers need the freedom to invoke body parts, mayhem and twisted visions for many profound reasons, among them (jumping metaphors) the same reason that chefs need the freedom to invoke curry, garlic, extreme heat and many other things we can’t tolerate in straight doses, in order to produce a cuisine. There is no mention of jalepeno peppers in the Christian Scriptures, and neither the average child nor the average televangelist can handle them. That’s no reason to legislate them clean out of our huevos rancheros .

Now the literary and Christian argument: In the slender classic, “An Experiment in Criticism,” the non-literalistic but indefatigably Christian professor of literature, C. S. Lewis, wrote that our access to a diverse and uncensored literature is spiritually crucial because “We demand windows. (And) literature . . . is a series of windows, even of doors. . . . Good reading . . . can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But that is an old paradox; ‘he that loseth his life shall save it.’ We therefore delight to enter into other men’s beliefs . . . even though we think them untrue. And into their passions, though we think them depraved. . . . Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. . . . In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. . . . Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”

4. Why No Argument Against Fundamentalist Censorship Works

My home state, Oregon, according to its Library Association, was third in the nation in 1992 in the number of challenges to the printed word in schools, libraries and bookstores. The vast majority of these challenges were made by people who consider themselves fundamentalist Christians. I’ve just provided two arguments against such challenges. But I don’t for a minute believe that either of my arguments--nor any conceivable argument resembling them in category--will persuade a single committed fundamentalist that censorship is an ineffective or negative or potentially deadly cultural strategy. The only way to convince a fundamentalist of such a thing would be with a fundamentalist argument. And there are none. Fundamentalism and censorship have always gone hand in hand.

My aim here is literary, not theological. But for literary reasons I am compelled to point out that a theologically motivated, politically powerful cult is out to simplify and “improve” our literature, art, science, sexual choices, Constitution and souls. And I see no effective choice, in defending all of the above, but to confront the theological basis of the cult itself. When I see poets and authors capable of making crowds weep at the beauty of their words reduced to explaining to some half-sentient TV news hound that they are trying to defend freedom of expression, not the freedom of pedophiles, I feel that some huge strategic error is being committed.

Literary people, being comparatively deep, are often mystified and stymied by the relentless shallowness of fundamentalist attacks. But the belligerent mind-set and self-insulating dogmas that enable this cult to thrive are neither complicated nor invulnerable to criticism. To treat the earth as disposable and the Bible as God, turn that God into a political action committee, equate effrontery with “evangelism,” aggression with “compassion,” disingenuous televised prattle with “prayer” and call the result “Christianity” is hardly an invincible position. Evangelists such as Pat Robertson subsidize their organizations by manufacturing a series of carefully designed “moral emergencies” that threaten “us,” or better yet “our children.” Rather than defending various scapegoats over the din of fundamentalist alarms and media sirens, I’d like to take a brief look at the manufacturers themselves.

5. American Fundamentalism

All of the famous televangelists, all the leaders of the contemporary Bible-based political alliances and most of the recent censors of school libraries, crusaders against homosexuality and politically active fundamentalists in general share a conviction that their political and social causes and agendas are approved of, if not inspired, by no less a being than God. This enviable conviction is less enviably arrived at by accepting on faith, hence as fact, that the Christian Bible pared down into American TV English is God’s “word” to mankind, that this same Bible is “His” only word to mankind, and that the fundamentalist’s unprecedentedly literalistic slant on this Bible is the one true slant.

The position is remarkably self-insulating. Possessing little knowledge of and no respect for the world’s many rich spiritual, literary and cultural traditions, these people have no conceptions or models of love and compassion but their own and can therefore honestly, even good-heartedly, say that it is out of “Christian” compassion and a sort of “tough love” for others that they seek to impose on all others their God, Bible and slant.

The position is also far from unprecedented. Well-known variations on the theme include the Inquisitor’s tough love for heretics, the conquistador’s tough love for Incans, Aztecs and Mayans, the Puritan’s tough love for witches, the white Western settler’s tough love for Native Americans, and so on. Every Bible-reifying crusader group from the European prototype to my home state’s Citizens Alliance has seen itself as fighting to make its own or some other community more “Christian.” The result, among contemporary non-fundamentalists, has been a growing revulsion toward anything that chooses to call itself “Christian.” Yet to this day, I see no more crucial text, in defusing fundamentalist crusades, than the four books of the Gospels, and no more important question to keep asking all such crusaders than whether there is anything truly Christian--that is, anything compassionate, self-abnegating, empathetic and enemy-loving--about their various crusades.

This being a literary essay, it’s only fair to point out that fundamentalists are book lovers, too. They just happen to have invested so much brittle love in the first three (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus) and final (Revelations) books of the one black-covered volume that their ability to enjoy, comprehend or even tolerate other volumes has been drastically curtailed. But another question--again both literary and theological--that needs to be asked is: How brittle can one’s love become before it ceases to be love at all?

The ex-Dominican priest and writer Matthew Fox answers this question by calling contemporary evangelical fundamentalism “Christofascism.” But when I’ve tried to deploy this term, it has felt noxious upon my tongue. What’s the difference between Fox or me shouting “Christofascist!” at fundamentalists and Rush Limbaugh shouting “feminazi!” at feminists? Both coinages are a calculated descent into the realm of name-calling. Of course, in the escalating verbal and political warfare between fundamentalism and arts and letters, name-calling has become so difficult to avoid that even actual names have become a form of name-calling. If you want to attack conservative Christianity, for instance, you describe the shenanigans of the Jimmys Bakker and Swaggart; and if you want to demonstrate the decadence of literature and art, you describe the imaginative abominations of Bret Easton Ellis and rectal bullwhips of Robert Mapplethorpe. But with “Christofascism” supposedly lurking to the right of us, and “feminazism” to the left, I am inclined to place Mahatma Gandhi front and center, warning: “Be careful of the means you use to fight the fascist, lest you become fascists yourselves.”

The fundamentalist right is outspoken in its desire to simplify and control my vocabulary, my profession and my spirituality. What I feel compelled to do in response is insist upon a distinction. There is a complex 2,000-year-old religious and cultural tradition that calls itself Christianity. There is a plethora of comparatively new factions of Bible-idolizing literalists who call themselves by the same name. But they are not the same. To refer to Origen, Oral Roberts, Dante, Billy Graham, St. Francis, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Lady Julian of Norwich all as “Christians” stretches the meaning clear out of the term. The word “humanoid” is as helpful. The gulf between traditional Christianity and American fundamentalism is vast. A Francis Schaeffer text used to instruct Baptist seminarians all over the United States on the world’s supposed cults, doctrinal blunders and “other religions” defines and illustrates the concept and history of what it calls “mysticism” by analyzing the writings of Henry Miller. To teach that mysticism equals Henry Miller is not teaching at all. It’s an attempt to churn out ideological clones who want no “windows,” no insight into others, no enlargement or effacement of self--clones content to read and idolatrize their one book, willfully misread all others and deliberately use the resulting curtailment of comprehension, pleasure and tolerance as a unifying principle.

6. Shame and Reverence

That fly-fishing protagonist of my censored novel, Gus, voiced some serious reservations about the being fundamentalists so possessively refer to as “God.” But a literary morality problem that Gus (and I) ran into in telling his story was that, after a climactic all-night adventure with a river and a huge chinook salmon, he had a sudden, transrational (or, in the old Christian lexicon, “mystical”) experience that left him too overwhelmed to speak with Pound’s “fundamental accuracy of statement,” yet too grateful to speak not at all. The paradox this presented my protagonist was, and is, autobiographical. As the recipient of several such detonations, I felt bound by gratitude to speak. But as a lifelong victim of the pollution of the Christian lexicon, I felt compelled to speak in non-Christian terms. Gus’ account of his ineffable experience did not once invoke the word God . But it did speak of transcendent love, and of a being so God-like that in the end he dubbed it “the Ancient One.”

Reader reactions to this climax have been neatly divided. Those who have experienced analogous detonations have sometimes been so moved by the scene that their eyes filled as they thanked me for writing it; and those who have experienced no such detonation have as often asked why I ruined a dang good fishin’ yarn with mystical mumbo jumbo. Odd as it may sound, I agree with both reactions. Both are perfectly honest. What more should a writer want from a reader? What more, for that matter, can mortals--be they skeptic or mystic--offer the Absolute? A French novelist/philosopher, Rene Daumal, describes the paradox I faced perfectly. He wrote:

“I swear to you that I have to force myself to write or to pronounce this word: God. It is a noise I make with my mouth or a movement of the fingers that hold my pen. To pronounce or to write this word makes me ashamed. What is real here is that shame. . . . Must I never speak of the Unknowable because it would be a lie? Must I speak of the Unknowable because I know that I proceed from it and am bound to bear witness to it? This contradiction is the prime mover of my best thoughts.”

Another word for this shame, in my opinion, is reverence. And American fundamentalists, speaking of the Unknowable, too often lack this quality. Their preachers proudly pronounce the word “God,” define it, worship their own definition, impose it upon all adherents, offer an eternal reward for this arrogance, promise eternal torment to all who fail to agree. What an abyss between this and the self-giving Christianity of a Francis, an Eckhart, a Martin Luther King Jr. What a gulf, too, between this and the contemporary Amish--who practice no evangelism, who tease those who quote the Bible too often (calling them “Scripture smart”) and who consider it laughable to pronounce oneself “saved,” since God alone is capable of making such weighty decisions.

And what a gulf between fundamentalism and American literature. If the latter arrives at any general theological conclusion as to what we owe to a divinity, it is probably this: Better to be honest to God--even if that means stating one’s complete lack of belief in any such being--than to force one’s imagination and mind into the mold of a ready-made dogma. In literature, as in life, there are ways of disbelieving in God that are more compassionate, and in that sense more “Christian,” than many forms of orthodox belief. There are atheists, for example, who believe as they do because the general state of the world and of humanity makes it impossible for them to conceive of a creator who is anything but compassionless, remiss or cruel. Rather than consider God cruel, they choose disbelief. To my mind this is a backhanded form of reverence; a beautiful kind of “shame.”

It seems to upset many fundamentalists that literature’s answer to the God question is virtually the same as the Constitution’s. There is also no doubt that the openness that our literature and form of government encourage results in a theological cacophony and mood of irritable independence that bear no resemblance to the unison docility that reigns in the average church. But America is a country, and America’s a literature that stakes its life on the belief that this cacophony and independence are not only legal, but essential to our ultimate health.

Edward Abbey remains welcome in our libraries, as he will never be in our churches, to say: “God is Love? Not bloody likely!” Goethe remains welcome to reply to him: “As a man is, so is his God; therefore God is often an object of mockery.” And readers remain welcome to draw their own conclusions.

My mother tongue, the language my parents and grandparents used to draw me from virtual non-being into the naming of and engagement with life, is English. And there are only so many English words with which to describe the eternal verities and the journey of the soul. One of the irreplaceable words in this language is God . Yet the God of organized fundamentalism, as advertised daily through a variety of mass media, is a supramundane Caucasian male as furious with humanity’s failure to live by a few arbitrarily chosen lines from the Book of Leviticus as He is oblivious to His spokespersons’ failure to live by the militant compassion of the Gospels.

As surely as I feel love and need for my wife and children, I feel love and need for a God. But this feeling has nothing whatever to do with supramundane Caucasian males. And I am not troubled by this. If the fundamentalists’ God were indeed the One and Only, the likes of Gandhi and Mother Teresa, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Jung and Merton, Black Elk and Chief Joseph, Thoreau and John Muir, Rumi and Hafiz, John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich, Lao-tzu and Bodhidharma, Kabir and Mira Bai, Shunryu and D. T. Suzuki, Valmiki and Socrates, Dogen and Dante, would all be heretics, atheists and infidels--because the Absolute they all worship is an infinitely different being.

I suspect the situation to be rather different. I suspect the odd “evangelical” truth of the matter to be that fundamentalists need non-fundamentalists of all stripes--be they mystics, agnostics, Amish, artists, writers, scientists, believers, nonbelievers--in such a big way that it may not be going too far to say they need us for their salvation. As Mark Twain pointed out a century ago, the only really prominent Christian community that fundamentalists have ever managed to establish in any of the worlds is hell.