Meet a true fundamentalist and you will meet a person who is plagued with an overactive case of certainty. For the fundamentalist knows that he knows that he knows that he is right about…everything. For to be wrong about anything, even the smallest, tiniest detail would be to open himself up to the attacks of the Enemy. And the Enemy is behind every bush and tree.

Because of this belief that any small slip may result in utter doctrinal catastrophe, to fundamentalists there is no such thing as a minor doctrine. For if your ecclesiology should falter then your eschatology will wobble and your pneumatology cannot be far from total destruction. Like a tower of Jenga blocks the whole sorry mess will come crashing down around your ears. And all because you had the wrong opinion on when the church really started or what apostles do. For shame.

There is a great technique used by fundies to accomplish this kind of escalation: ‘upping the ante.’ Take the issue of gender roles, for example. Not content to merely defend the literal reading of the command to wives to submit, the fundamentalist (and more recently the CBMW folks who have apparently drunk from the same stream) will up the ante by declaring that to ignore this command is to DESECRATE THE RELATIONSHIP OF CHRIST AND THE CHURCH! See how that works? From minor doctrine to major doctrine in 0.8 seconds.

You too can play this game of upping the ante. Simply follow these easy steps:

Step 1: Stake out a position on a minor doctrine — the more obscure the better.
Step 2: Tie the minor doctrine firmly to a major one
Step 3. use words like “heresy” and “compromiser”
Step 4: Profit.

In fundamentalist circles there is no greater crime than publicly declaring that there is a problem in fundamentalist circles. Indeed it is far worse to notice that there are problems than to actually be part of the problem. Anyone who aspires to be a naysayer will labeled with the most heinous of descriptors known to fundamentalism: “having a critical spirit.”

The critical spirit (and its cousin “evil questioning”) often shows up in the text of pastoral rants against those who would ask questions such as “If we really had 300 people saved last year, why did our membership only grow because of the two people who came here from the Baptist church down the road?” It’s better to just say “amen!” when the stats are read and not think about it too hard.

Whether it’s poor exegesis, pitiful orthopraxy, or just plain wrong-headed thinking in your church, the fundamentalist solution is simply to ignore it hope it will go away on its own before anybody gets the courage to admit they noticed.  Go thou and do likewise.  And whatever you do, don’t start a vaguely humorous, often long-winded blog to talk about these issues. They’ll just call you bitter and spiteful too.

No commentary needed.

The Bible is ostensibly the fundamentalists authority for all matters of faith, practice, and flatware. As a result, the adjective “biblical” gets applied to anything and everything that the fundy does. There is biblical soul-winning, biblical courtship, biblical dress codes, biblical counseling, biblical dentistry, and so on.

The proverbial fly in the soup is, of course, that very few of these things are actually found explicitly or implicitly commanded to be done in fundy style anywhere in the actual Bible. Nobody would be more surprised than the prophets and apostles to learn that they had unwittingly given explicit instructions for how long a man’s hair is allowed to grow or the types of instruments allowed to play in a church service.

One is left to suppose that requiring actual Bible passages and exegesis to support arbitrary standards is something that is decidedly not biblical. And then one’s head explodes.

Because everyone knows the less you know about what you’re doing the better it is.

In case anybody is unfamiliar with the books he’s preaching against, Tim Lahaye’s book The Act of Marriage has historically been pretty much the one and only sex ed book for fundy married couples. It basically contains a few pages of clinical descriptions and some confusing diagrams followed by 987 pages of instructions about stuff you shouldn’t ever do.

If that’s too much information, one has to wonder what kind of education this preacher would find acceptable. Perhaps this set of LPs??

He’s getting cannier about knowing that people are going to fact check him. Notice that he makes a point of mentioning that this is “that this is only his opinion” and will be on YouTube.

But then he goes on to mocks the ‘freshman theologians’ who are going to disagree with them and says they haven’t ’studied it as much as he has.’ He’s claiming it without claiming it to leave himself wiggle room. It’s subtle but it’s there.

I suspect that a lot of those skulls full of mush are going to leave that room telling it as fact because it’s what their preacher believes.

Pastor RA Smith lays it on the line, Bless God.

More goodness from the same guy who believes The Wizard of Oz is the wickedest movie ever made.

By the time a fundamentalists graduates high-school and Bible college he or she has heard roughly 17,436 messages on how to find God’s will — a topic surpassed only, perhaps, by sermons on fleeing youthful lust. Divining God’s will on such matters as which college to pick and which person to marry is a very sneaky and subtle thing that is very easily missed if one isn’t careful. One wrong step can lead to absolute destruction.

Consider this cautionary tale. “I was supposed to be a missionary in Botswana and instead I totally misunderstood the Holy Spirit’s leading and went to Brazil instead. After spending 20 years sharing the gospel there I realized that all those souls won and churches started should never have been.” Such stories are as heartbreaking as they are commonplace. Heed their warning well.

If you are ever in doubt as to what the perfect will of God is, the answer is to consult the Holy Spirit — who is conveniently located inside any local fundamentalist leader. You’ll never have to wonder what do to again.

If you’ve ever heard a train whistle as you’re lying in bed late at night and the first thought through your mind was “The Rapture!”, you may have been a fundamentalist.

To be sure, a fascination with the Rapture is hardly unique to fundamentalists. If nothing else, the wildly popular Left Behind series written by two very non-fundamentalist types attests to that fact. But the fundies have especially honed the skill of using something as glorious and anticipated as Christ’s return to terrorize the living bejeebers out of people.

“When Christ comes back, what will he find you doing?” is the ever-present question. One is forced to wonder whether fundamentalists think that Christ can’t see what everyone is doing right now and will have to actually show up in the flesh to set things straight. The fact that those sinners then be made perfect and get to avoid judgment is sort of forgotten in all this.

The worst of this is the notion that when the Rapture happens there may be people who will be unsaved and die in Tribulation fire because a fundamentalists shirked his duty and didn’t witness. Our sovereign God is evidently quite hampered by such human shortcomings. And to make things worse, fundamentalists teach that once the Rapture happens there will be no more chance for repentance for anyone who has heard the gospel. This is all found in Scripture somewhere or another but it’s hard to pin down just where.

As for all the Rapture-deniers out there, it’s likely you aren’t even saved and won’t know what hit you when that great trumpet blows and your airplane crashes because your pilot has been whisked away. Enjoy!