Blog on the Lillypad
Monday, January 19, 2004
 | 1984, doublethink, and IFB-KJVO Fundamentalism
On my mandatory quest for ways to relax, I have joined two library book clubs. Everybody reads one book per month, and we get together once in that month to discuss it. For February 8th's meeting of the Literary Pursuits group, I read the selected book, 1984, by George Orwell. It lacks the brevity and impact of Animal Farm, though it certainly has plenty of impact. Orwell's depiction of a government that rewrites truth and reality as being that which can exist only in the mind rather than as objective entities apart from the psychology/memory of the observer is thought provoking, distressing, and does call to mind the dictates of Jack Hyles, who commanded his people that they should do what he told them to do because he was their preacher. Same thing. Truth was not objective in Hylesology. Truth became what Jack Hyles said was truth. It became subjective but not less obligatory. |
Indeed, the Party in 1984 also rewrites history by altering the historical reference points. Every textbook gets rewritten; facts are deleted from the social consciousness. People are not sure what happened in the past, and so they tend to believe that the Party has been around forever. This also reminds me of Baptist Fundamentalism, in which preachers themselves have no idea about the significance of Martin Luther, John Foxe, Samuel Rutherford, or a host of others who laid solid foundations of theology and political religious freedom. But in their minds, Billy Sunday and Frank Norris are figures of gigantic proportions, who they think swayed the course of history.
Their one colossus in the faith from semi-distant history is King James, the pro-papist, Divine Right of Kings proponent, persecutor of Puritans, who engaged in love affairs with young men. IFB-KJVO'ers tend to deny these documented facts about him, insisting by quoting his contemporary sycophants that he was a scholar and a devout believer. The fact that even the most secular of scholars recognize and record that King James could only ape scholarship and purchase it for himself escapes them. And that he is universally acknowledged as a sovereign trying to hold onto his role as the Head of the Church of England (one of the main reasons he wanted to get the Geneva Bible out of pulpits and so commissioned a new translation) also escapes them. The KJV has a grand cadence. It uses Thee and Thou (you know, like the angels in heaven do). And it's in ENGLISH. So of course God has ordained it to be a centerpiece of the revelation of Himself to man.
The ignorance necessary to be an IFB-KJVO is part of the curriculum in the IFB-KJVO schools. Just as Orwell's ironic society had a Ministry of Love that tortures people to death (or into insanity), a Ministry of Education that wipes out all real facts from public awareness, a Ministry of Plenty that limits all goods to meager rations, so IFB-KJVO Fundamentalism sets up colleges in order to spread ignorance and make it a mandatory part of the preacher's mindset. The Greek that is taught (if it's taught at all) is too lame to be useful for any real translation work. History study is cursory and usually focuses on recent history. And history studies don't allow for a wide range of authors or scholarship. Worst of all, the concept of in-depth study of the Bible, or spending hours each day in the study looking for the deep meanings of the Scripture is mocked. I've heard IFB preachers say they have no use for doctrine but want to preach on practical things (which betrays their ignorance of the essential nature of doctrine as a means for living the Christian life), and I have heard IFB leaders laugh at those who search for "the deep meanings of Scripture."
IFB-KJVO colleges (and indeed, many IFB-KJVO sermons) are not educational. Rather, they are propagandistic. As has been all too apparent on the FFF, IFB-KJVO thinking is not based on reason but on slogan. They confuse the two, and when a person unmasks their faulty thinking, they resort to a different form of slogan: insult.
1984 is a tremendous treatise on the necessity of broad education, the power of words, the necessity of critical thinking, and the necessity of a compassionate morality that makes human dignity sacrosanct.
But in terms of the lies and the scandal and cover-ups in the IFB-KJVO movement (as well as the kooky belief that a translation of Greek into English can be both perfect and inspired), here are some crucial lines about a concept that Orwell calls doublethink"
To know and to not know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it (Plume Edition 36).Thus we have men who claim that the Bible is the cornerstone of our faith, but they don't know what the Bible says. We have preachers who claim that morality is absolute, yet they don't preach against the gross immorality that has sprung up. We have preachers who exalt the office of the preacher, and yet they allow dolts and perverts to attain that office. We have preachers who claim to be intent on saving America, and they do so by hauling in bus loads of children for quick, baseless salvation "decisions" and never address the Scripture to anybody who actually has anything to do with America. Indeed, go to the FFF and look at the man who bills himself as an evangelist and yet runs a post called "Idiot of the Day" in which he ridicules the very lost people he claims to have come to evangelize. Fundamentalist preachers will tell you that salvation is through Christ alone, and they depend upon Him, but if you suggest a day of repentance to them, they become angry.
Orwell writes, "Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are hatred, fear, adulation, and orgiastic triumph....It is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war." (Plume edition 197).
This mindset of the outer Party member is what so many IFB-KJVO preachers are. Who can deny it? Go read the FFF. And the Party members (Sorry, I mean IFB-KJVO preachers) who are not of this mindset refuse to confront the mindset and rebuke it. As depicted in 1984, those members of the "IFB-KJVO Party" who are not villains are impotent and ineffective.
The Party in Orwell's novel has a slogan that forms the basis of its policy of constantly rewriting reality: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past" (Plume edition 36).
It sounds like nonsense until you realize that if you keep people ignorant of the real past, and impose on them the state of war mentality, you gain a power to keep them living for the future that you describe, even if that future never comes. The Party becomes everything so long as its members believe in the past created by the Party and trust what it tells them about its progress. Thus the IFB-KJVO "Party" thrives on the scholastic ignorance of its grassroots preachers and pastors. It maintains a state of war mentality as it turns the secular world into a battle field filled with enemies rather than a field white unto harvest. It focuses its proletariat on an impending rapture so that no matter how they are worked here, victimized, underpaid, humiliated, repeatedly "challenged" even if they are at their lowest, they keep their focus on the "Party's" ultimate triumph.
If Fundamentalists should ever become educated; if they should ever truly become concerned for the lot of the gays, the liberals, the abortionists, the pagans, the homeless, the insane, the retarded, the abused, the hostile, then what? Orwell wrote of Party leadership warning of any Party member who might break through to see people outside the Party. If that were to happen, then such a person was in acute danger of seeing that foreigners are just like him, and "the sealed world in which he lives should be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate" (201).
 | Orwell foresaw the dangers of "The Party" coming into government, but he did not foresee what would happen if "the Party" came into the Church. For that, we have a reality before us in which doublethink is far too real to be a mere fiction. Even in current Fundamentalist doublethink, there are men who claim to be preachers who---when I reproach them for the rampant, perverted sin that they deny and refuse to address in some of the most honored pulpits of the IFB-KJVO movement---come back at me with a demand to know how many souls I have won to Christ.
The logic is clear. If a person wins souls, he is to be excused from his gross sins. Orwell acknowledged such sentiments when Winston, his main character, supposes that "the Party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect, doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others" (271). Some people take refuge in the idea that as long as good is the ultimate outcome, some degree of evildoing must be excused or even accepted. |
But the villain of the novel---ironically---saves Winston from this fallacy. The Party, he assures Winston, is self surviving and therefore self serving. It lives to foster itself and not those it alleges to protect: "The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power" (272). What the villains in the IFB-KJVO movement have done has not been inadvertent slips in the course of doing good. Their deeds have been the object from the beginning: the exaltation of themselves and their roles in "The Party." And the preachers who refuse to confront, refuse to learn God's Word in earnest instead of by slogan, insisting on refuge in their roles and in their cultural religion rather than true religion, do what they do because they have an objective: the preservation of their IFB-KJVO Party.
