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(OPINION) David French has become my go-to pundit on questions of the interaction among religion, politics and culture.

French, a columnist for The New York Times, is proving himself an able successor in my journalistic canon to the late Michael Gerson of The Washington Post, who died in 2022.

Like Gerson, French is probably more conservative than I am on some matters. But that’s OK, because he’s a smart, compassionate and reasonable conservative — not a loony, violent, conspiracy-mongering one.

An evangelical Christian, he recently wrote about why so many of his fellow White evangelicals have veered off into a hardcore right-wing brand of fundamentalism.

(Note: People often use “evangelical” and “fundamentalist" interchangeably, but they’re not synonyms, either historically or presently. They’re different movements that sometimes overlap.)

French’s piece includes a discussion of what fundamentalism looks like and why it attracts certain kinds of people. His insights there are worth passing along, and I want to add a few of my own observations, as that topic has been a longtime interest of mine as well.

He says Richard Land, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, once told him that “fundamentalism is far more a psychology than a theology.”

That is 100% correct.

“That’s why, for example, you can have competing Christian fundamentalisms, competing Muslim fundamentalisms and secular movements that possess fundamentalist characteristics,” French says.

Myself, I’d take the idea further. I’ve long predicted that eventually scientists will identify a fundamentalist gene inherent in some people, just as some folks have biological predispositions toward intelligence, heart disease or tallness.

Researchers will find this gene blocks its carriers from perceiving philosophical grays, much less a full-color spectrum. Such people have, in effect, spiritual color-blindness. They see everything in stark blacks and whites; they can’t help it.

I arrived at this conclusion after meeting fundamentalists in literally every philosophical, religious or political worldview I’ve encountered: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, atheism, environmentalism, conservatism, liberalism, feminism, communism, capitalism. Every group has its share of extremists.

Remove the labels, close your eyes and quickly the fundamentalists in one group start sounding uncannily like the fundamentalists in all other groups, as if they were reading from the same script.

There’s no movement, no matter how thoughtful or peaceable or largely valid it is, that extremists can’t hijack and corrupt to their own paranoid ends.

French argues that all fundamentalist cultures exhibit three traits: certainty, ferocity and solidarity.

He says certainty is the key to the other two traits:

“The fundamentalist mind isn’t clouded by doubt. In fact, when people are fully captured by the fundamentalist mind-set, they often can’t even conceive of good-faith disagreement. To fundamentalists, their opponents aren’t just wrong but evil. Critics are derided as weak or cowards or grifters. Only a grave moral defect can explain the failure to agree.”

This unquestioning certitude produces ferocity:

“Indeed, ferocity — not piety — is a principal trait of every truly fundamentalist movement I’ve ever encountered,” French says. “Ferocity is so valuable to fundamentalism that it can cover a multitude of conventional Christian sins.”

Fundamentalists feel justified in, indeed often delight in, lashing out at perceived enemies.

Solidarity, the third trait, “is the sense of shared purpose and community that makes any form of fundamentalism truly potent. There is an undeniable allure to the idea that you’re joining a community that has achieved an understanding of life’s mysteries or discovered a path to resolving injustice. As angry as fundamentalists may feel, at the same time, there is true joy among comrades in the foxhole — at least as long as they remain comrades.”

Yes, yes and yes.

But I might add to French’s list an additional, related trait: fear.

Fundamentalist worldviews nearly always are steeped in fear: of sinful influences, of competing facts, of persecution, of loss of faith, of looking ridiculous, of God’s wrath, of an impending apocalypse. Only by keeping themselves untainted by “the world” or “unbelievers” or certain types of education or — fill in the blank — can true believers hold on faithfully and attain their salvation. 

Extremists often succeed at steamrolling established institutions “because their opponents — almost by definition — have less certainty, less ferocity and less solidarity,” French says.

Ultimately, fundamentalism sows the seeds of its own destruction.

“Certainty, which gives so much purpose, ultimately struggles in the face of complex realities,” French says. “Ferocity, which allows fundamentalists to bully and intimidate opponents, also limits the ability to win converts. And solidarity, which creates community, can become stifling, as it encourages conformity and punishes those who raise good-faith questions.”

He’s right again. Nearly all fundamentalist movements eventually implode.

The tragedy lies in how many lives they wreck before the inevitable end arrives.

Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.