The Fundamentalist

I went to a lecture this week on Creationism. I saw Stephan Jay Gould talk on this topic once and was disappointed. So I was with this talk. The scientist has a peculiar problem: He has all the facts and the Creationists do not care. That is an astonishing modern opinion. Not only do they not care but they think your opinion, however factual, will damn you to hell forever. Nor do they just oppose you and your facts, they want to help you. They want to free you from your myopic scientific accuracy. The scientist's reaction to this is intense ridicule (because the Creationist is beyond debate.) But when faith can move mountains, the Olduvai Gorge is a cinch.
The real story in Creationism is who are these people? And what does this thought process mean?
Fundamentalism is a gift of Luther: He mandated the individual interpretation of the Bible. No ermined middlemen for him. (It was Galileo's original sin: He published his beliefs in Italian, not Latin.) Now a whole subculture fills the towns and hollows that believes the earth was made in six days and that dinosaurs and man cavorted together vegetarianly before the Fall. They are a hard, certain breed. They fight America's wars. They spilled out of the Appalachians, murdered an entire race and settled a completely hostile land. Tom Wolfe, in his essay on Junior Johnson, remarks that in the Korean War the area of greater New York had a single congressional Medal of Honor winner; De Kalb County had twenty three. The author Max Byrd said of them, "Where others have love in their hearts, they have rage."
The nature of this country, its underlying sinew, has always been obscure to me but it is easier to see when the fundamentalist is there. It is hard to see the American Revolution as a logical outcome of human social evolution; it is isolated and unique. The fundamentalist is a breed native to this country; the king, old church rules demanding a biblical translator, are perfect targets for this rugged, flint-eyed crowd. They don't fight science, they dismiss it. They are not a cult or some shard of a society; they are a coherent, integrated, intense mutually supportive community that is closer to a new foreign speaking immigrant population. I can see their ancestors shambling in and out of battle lines at Valley Forge, trying to get the crops in but, when convenient, spoiling for a fight. This personality, held down for so long by various rules, codes and superstitions didn't suddenly start believing in the Rights of Man; they always believed it, they just suddenly were better armed. I wonder about this country's nature, not so much with them here as when they are gone.