Debate: helpful or not?
Do debates bring people together, or entrench differences?
There’s nothing like a good debate to clarify positions. The wits are sharpened, the arguments refined and defined, and we finish with a clearer idea of where we stand. This is democracy’s gift to us. Or is it? In one of her many thoughtful explorations of religions, Karen Armstrong looks at how fundamentalism starts. In The Bible – the Biography, she says it rarely begins as a battle with an external foe, more as an internal struggle in which ‘traditionalists fight their co-religionists’.
Fundamentalist institutions, she goes on, respond to modernity by creating an enclave of pure faith – ‘the yeshiva or the Bible college where the faithful can reshape their lives’.
When attacked, such movements become more extreme. Citing the Scopes trial in the American south where a teacher was prosecuted for teaching evolution, Armstrong points out that prior to the trial, although southern conservatives were wary of evolutionary theory, few had espoused creationism. ‘Fundamentalists had been willing to work for social reform with people on the left.’ But following their trouncing in the national press for their attitudes, they swung to the far right of the political spectrum – ‘where they have remained ever since’.
In watching the debate over theism and non-theism in the pages of the Friend I am reminded of Armstrong’s words. This argument shows no signs of abating, resolving, or accommodating. Instead of an exploration of other positions, the hardy debaters reiterate their fixed positions – endlessly.
Will this long-running argument about faith produce fundamentalists of the variety described by Armstrong? Is this where our Quaker debate is leading us?
Should an editor draw a line under it, or is that undemocratic?
