Stuff You Should Know - Fundamentalism: Menace II Society

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

Fundamentalism is usually thought of as a problem religions have to deal with, but not all fundamentalists are religious. And no matter what their belief system, fundamentalism is inherently antisocial and a problem for everyone.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, February 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 2023. We're going to be in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, again 2023. That's right. We can't wait to get back on stage. We've really missed doing live shows. Come out and see us. Tickets are already on sale and where can you get those?

At linktree-s-y-s-k-live. That's l-i-n-k-t-r-dot-e-e-slash-s-y-s-k-live. Can't wait to see everybody. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bright and Jerry's here, of course, which makes this Stuff You Should Know for real. Can I lead off with a couple of just fun quick shout outs before we get to the not fun topic? Go into Boston tomorrow to see pavement. Oh, that's what you're doing. Okay, great. My old friend from high school, Robert Chahade of Tufts University fame. Okay.

Okay. We were texting about pavement and he said, this is back when tickets went on sale. I'm going to both Atlanta shows, of course, and he said, you want to come up here? I was like, heck yeah. Nice. So, going to see the boys tomorrow and also want to quickly shout out. I just got back recently from my 10th, 11th, and 12th Bonnie Prince Billy shows of the last couple of years. Awesome. And I just want to shout out the great people in towns of Santa Cruz, California, Pasa Robles, California, and Big Sur. Oh yeah. Just had a great time out there. It's my part of the country. Love Northern California. It's my vibe. Had great breakfast

burritos, great food. They do them right, man. You can't get a real decent breakfast burrito in Atlanta and I don't know why. That's going to be my retirement job. Oh, that's great. I'll come patronize your breakfast burritos. I don't know what is so hard about a California-style breakfast burrito, but Atlanta does not seem capable. It's probably too healthy. It's not healthy? Okay. Well, then I don't know. I'm all out of ideas, Chuck. It's so frustrating. Anyway, great towns, great shows, another great run with the great Will Oldham. This time solo, first time I've ever seen him literally by himself. He has a variety of arrangements ranging from full band to a couple of people to six or eight, to bluegrass style, and this was

just him, which was a treat. Unplugged for once. Plugged a butacoustic, yeah. Okay. Did you, I was wondering if you'd gotten yourself a band to follow him around in yet? No, no. I'm flying to these places. Okay, that seems sensible. Because then I rent a car. It'd be tough to get back in time to work, you know? I wish you could fly in a place and rent a little hippy van to follow someone around for a few days. That sounds like your retirement job. Instead of some dumb midsize SUV. Yeah, you could be like, run a VW wagon. Yeah. Get a free breakfast burrito. There you go. That's it. I might invest in that one. All right, now let's talk about fundamentalism. Yeah, let's talk about fundamentalism. This is one of those, I guess, episodes that

ties into a bunch of other stuff, and it's the kind of thing that you don't really think about, and then when you do think about, you wish you weren't thinking about, but it's kind of important, I think, for everybody to be aware of. Because with fundamentalism, a lot of people, especially non-religious people, just presume that fundamentalism is a religious thing only. Not necessarily. It definitely does affect religions most easily, as we'll see, but basically anything that people really hold dear can actually produce fundamentalism. And when you kind of strip it of its religious connotations, it becomes clear like, oh yeah, there's a lot of fundamentalism going on around us, especially in 2022. And it has given me, just researching this, it's given me a deeper impulse

to be like, hold the center. Hold the center. We can make it through this. We just have to get to the other side and make sure that the center remains intact. Yeah, I think, you put this together, you did a great job, by the way, on a tough topic. But I think the sociologist that you found that said this really had it, is fundamentalism is an ideology rather than a theology. So it can be religious in nature, but it doesn't have to be all that to say, sort of a long-winded COA, that this is not a hit piece on religion at all. But it is, you know, I think it is going to end up being a bit of a condemnation on fundamentalism because it's not a great way to be to say, hey, the way we think of things is the only right way,

everybody else is wrong, and I don't want anything to do with you. Well, not only that, you need to change your viewpoints to follow mine, because mine's the only right way to think. That's a terrible way to be. It's terrible. And truly, when you start to research fundamentalism, you do start to see it everywhere. Maybe not stuff that checks every single box, but when you understand the basics of it, it becomes clear we're surrounded by it right now. And that's actually kind of a new thing. One of the things about fundamentalism is when you kind of listen to what they're saying, they imagine that they're taking society back to this, you know, golden age or golden era when things, you know, were more sensible and more predictable

and reliable, and things just made sense more. But fundamentalism is actually a pretty modern thing. It only arose starting in about 1870, and it was originally this kind of assault or response to progressivism in religion. Yeah, that's a good way to say it. I think the first wave, you said, ran from about 1870 to 1929, I'm sorry, 1925. And we'll see in a minute here kind of how and why it ended, the first one at least, or at least brought it underground. But it started, or it took its name at least, from a series of pamphlets called The Fundamentals, colon, testimony of the truth. And that kind of says it all right there, like someone saying, this is the truth. This is not our opinion on maybe how things should be. This is the one way

that things clearly should be because it's the only way because it's the one truth. Yeah. And around that time, the late 19th century, religion in America was starting to become more progressive because society was modernizing and to kind of adapt and change and alter itself to this modernizing society. Just the understanding of what religion meant was under transition. And fundamentalists said, no, no, no, religion is religion. It doesn't matter what society does. This is the truth. This is the way that it's supposed to be. And we need to stop progressing away from it and being accommodating to modern society. We need to make modern society go back to the old ways, the ways where we're in charge. Yeah. And there was a big, sort of one of the

first big face punches to fundamentalism came about in 1859. Well, it kind of helped give rise to the original fundamentalism. But the publication of On the Origin and the Species from Darwin, which basically, you know, everyone knows what that did, that introduced evolution and natural selection and really undermine, sort of in writing for the first time, it challenged creationism as why we're here and how we got here. And it was, it sort of, as you'll see that, you know, at times when a fundamentalist might think or a religion might think that they're being threatened by new ideas, that's sort of when the lockdown goes on and they really sort of rise to the occasion and that sort of helped birth the big first rise of fundamentalism.

Yeah. Fundamentalism took its first swipe at modern modernity. Yeah. Sure. With the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, it was Tennessee versus Scopes, where Tennessee had charged a public school teacher, John Scopes, of teaching evolution in the classroom, which was against the law. They charged a science teacher with teaching science. Exactly. That's exactly right. And a guy, a very powerful and prestigious and smart attorney named Clarence Darrow came to the aid of John Scopes. And the Scopes Monkey Trial actually ended up putting not John Scopes on trial, but fundamentalism on trial. And Clarence Darrow was not a fan of fundamentalism, and he basically used this trial as an excuse to just show how ridiculous and

backwards these fundamentalists beliefs were. That's right. And it worked. He, in a sense, he lost the trial, I believe, until 1967, that ban on teaching evolution remained in effect until 1967 from 1925. But he lost the battle. He won the war in that the coverage of the Scopes Monkey Trial really kind of blew the whole thing up and dealt a big blow to what fundamentalism was in the U.S. and how much sort of influence they might have moving forward. And kind of what it did post Scopes was it kind of moved it back underground for several decades. Yeah. I kind of think of the Scopes Monkey Trial and the result of it is like when Homer gets embarrassed on the Simpsons and the whole town just points and laughs at him. In that instance, Homer is fundamentalism

in the 1920s in America, right? Like society did not think much of it afterward, which is surprising because it had been kind of a respected school of thought for a little while. And I guess it just kind of, it just went too far toward the mainstream. And as it went underground, it's not like it just went away. It actually built up a kind of like a shadow institution to rival the secular society, like schools, TV stations, colleges, seminaries, mission groups, and then also started to really kind of recruit new followers and members of these fundamentalist ideas through churches, through church outreach as well. And over the years, they just kind of built more and more strength and more and more strength. And in the late 70s was just like a tidal wave of fundamentalism

swept across the world and really caught sociology off guard. Yeah. And like you said, around the world, it wasn't just, we're not just saying like you, United States Christians did this. It was, it popped up in some very surprising places sometimes. But again, it kind of all happened at once. But there was a big distinction here with the second wave, in that the first wave was really to kind of strike back against progressive religious movement and to kind of keep religion as it was, and not to modernize religion in any way. This go around, it said, society is a whole. I don't want anything to do with this modernization and this progressivism that's going on. And forget religion, like we want to get involved in government.

And we'll, and we're going to do it in a big way. And that's when the Christian right was born and groups like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition put big money into politics and help us, you know, sort of the beginning of getting politicians elected with a pretty severe religious bent. Yeah. And in some cases, they were directly trying to elect fundamentalists like Pat Robertson, actually ran for president in 1988, ran a serious campaign. And did not win, but he is about as fundamentalist as you can get and see like on a mainstream television station with the 700 Club, but also like backing politicians with such gusto that the politicians they got elected basically owed them. And in that way, fundamentalism like really

kind of crept into American politics. And since that time, you start to see things like basically a challenge to the concept of something like a separation of church and state that is completely at odds with American Christian fundamentalism. And so there's been as fundamentalism has gotten more and more into American politics, the line between church and state has been blurred more and more. And that's just one example of it. Yeah. And like you mentioned, it happened all around the world in the late seventies in 1979 to be specific. Militant Shiites followed the Ayatollah Khomeini and took Iran away from the Shah and installed Khomeini as the leader. And you know, I remember this when I was a kid, if you and I mentioned this on the show before,

if you go back and just Google Iran pre-revolution, you will see a very swinging 60s and 70s groovy country that is not like the Iran we know today. And that was partially, or not partially, that was completely due to the Shiite uprising and revolution that happened because of religious fundamentalism in their case. Yeah, it's exactly like if followers of Jerry Falwell created an armed insurgency and overthrew the American government and installed Jerry Falwell as the supreme leader of America. It's the exact same thing. That's what happened in Iran. And it's really sad to see, but I mean, that's what happened. And it was part of this wave of fundamentalism. Israel started to get more fundamentalist starting in 1974. There's still

a lot of challenges by fundamentalism within Israeli politics today. India has a nationalist party, a Hindu nationalist party, I should say, the BJP. They're fundamentalists, Hindu fundamentalists. They've actually held power like the presidency multiple times since 1980. And then today, there's still waves of fundamentalism going on. And Africa has become a laboratory for Christian fundamentalists who basically travel to Africa as activists and get new laws, fundamentalist laws passed in countries like Uganda, where as of 2014, you can be sentenced to life in prison just for being gay. That is thanks to American fundamentalists who travel to Uganda, got in with the government and changed laws like that,

or got laws like that created or enforced. Yeah. And it's crazy when you look at the all that's happening at once, like you said, it's 79 in Iran, 74 in Israel, the 1970s in the United States. It's weird how things happen like that. I wonder if there's a podcast topic in there about like a non-planned coalescence of anything. Just like Geist coming together. Yeah, I guess that's sort of the word I'm looking for. I wonder too, because it's not like the Shiite militants in Iran were undergoing the same experience as the moral majority in the US, but the timing is insane. I mean, we're talking like within a year of each other, there's the Iranian revolution and the moral majority

springs up and gets Ronald Reagan elected. And then in India in 1980, the Hindu nationalist party gets founded. Like all of it happened at the same time. And it had to be, it had to intertwine in some way, but I just don't see like, you know, Pat Robertson and the Khomeini like coordinating in any way, so how did it happen? It's a great question. It's a pushback against something else that was happening, but I don't know. I think I find that so fascinating how societies move as a whole. All right. How about a break? Yes. I think we're doing good so far. Oh man, you jinxed us. And we'll talk a little bit more about the F word right after this.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars,

if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so there's some things that people, some misconceptions, see you jinxed us, Chuck,

that people have about fundamentalism. See? That's why I said the F word. I wasn't trying to be cheeky. I'm having a hard time saying the word. So there's some misconceptions about fundamentalism that most people, especially secular people have. And like we said at the outset, that a lot of people think it's an infection of religion and that it's a religion problem. And if you aren't a member of a church or religious group, it's not your problem. And that's absolutely untrue. And that viewpoint of the whole thing is actually a big problem for society as a whole. Yeah. And we mentioned earlier a little bit that like, often you'll see fundamentalism creep up when they feel like something is being threatened that they hold dear. And that's when

they really lock down and get active. And you can look at things like, you know, people are fundamentalists about the Second Amendment. People are fundamentalists about the First Amendment. And it's usually more so at times where they feel like those amendments are threatened. During the Cold War, people were, you know, the threat of communism really made people, a lot of people, fundamentalists about the free market, let's say. And what else? There's a lot of other great examples. Ironically, people like Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins, who are basically militantly anti-religious, they are accused by some of being fundamentalists in their thinking, in part because they're intolerant, which as we'll see is a really important part.

And that intolerance also gets liberal college campuses accused of becoming more and more fundamentalist in their thinking, where non-liberal professors can actually find their jobs in jeopardy and actually do get canned because of something they said that wasn't sufficiently liberal enough, right? So this is kind of what I was talking about earlier, where it's not like Bill Maher checks every single box of, you know, fundamentalism. But if you understand fundamentalism, he actually comes, there's enough boxes that it makes you question, okay, is this actually fundamentalist thinking? Same with constitutional originalists. Like it does not have to be religion. And once you stop looking at fundamentalism as a strictly religious

thing, it really does open one's eyes to just the world in general. Yeah, I totally agree. You mentioned something really important a second ago in that, which was intolerance, which is a real hallmark of fundamentalism. And a really great example that you gave in your research here is the Amish. You can't get any more sort of tight knit and strict religious than the Amish. But the Amish, you know, who knows what they say about us. They may judge us, but what they don't do is leave their community and knock on our door and try and convert you to being Amish and say the Amish way of thinking is the only right way and everyone else should be like this. Yeah, they're not running like Amish people in the local primaries to take over the

school board because they want to impose Amish beliefs on the rest of the community. They don't do that. They're not fundamentalists. And that's a really important distinction and intolerance. It's basically there is no compromise. There is one true viewpoint that is correct. And anything that differs from that is the enemy of that. Yeah. I mean, intolerance is such an important part of fundamentalism that you can almost use it as a litmus test to say, okay, is this thinking fundamentalist or not? Because if there's no intolerance, you just got the Amish. People who really, really believe in what they believe in, but they're not trying to impose their beliefs on anybody else and they're fine with you believing

whatever you believe, that's your problem. You're going to hell. Although I don't think the Amish hopefully think like that, but whatever. And that intolerance makes it like incompatible with society because in modern society, tolerance is extraordinarily important. And not only is it important, it's considered to be something that just kind of bubbles up to the top because it ends up holding society together. When you have so many different disparate people of different religions or different creeds of different nationalities of different sexual orientation of different genders all living together in one country and they can coexist peacefully, tolerance is just going to develop over time. And if you have

intolerance, active intolerance, that's an infection on that society. That's why fundamentalism is so dangerous to society. So yeah, I mean, that's a really good point. And in a modern society, we've talked before about the marketplace of ideas, which is the idea that people just throw out a lot of different ideas. And the ones that work the best are the ones that are going to rise to the top. And those are probably going to be the ones that are the most widely accommodating to the most people. And if you are a fundamentalist, you're not a big fan of the marketplace of ideas. You're not a big fan of what's the most widely accommodating, because as society has progressed over the years, it has gotten more, well, progressive and it's

gotten more modern. And things have moved forward. And fundamentalism is inherently kind of anti that in general. And they're like, that can spring up in the workplace. I don't want to work, I don't want to have a cubicle next to this kind of person, quote unquote. And it's not like, I'll go quit my job. It's like, no, why don't we, why don't they leave? Why don't you fire them? Right, for being gay, because they're the ones that are the problem. I'm the one that subscribes to the truth. And it doesn't even matter if you're speaking out or not speaking out against fundamentalist beliefs, if you just subscribe to a different way of thinking, you're challenging the truth. And that cannot be tolerated. Opposing viewpoints cannot be tolerated by fundamentalism.

They have to be stamped out. They have to be ostracized. They have to have violence against them in some cases. And so it would make more sense to that fundamentalist worker that their gay co-worker should be fired, not them. And that's, again, that's a huge contradiction to society and modern society in particular. Yeah. And I mean, you made a really good point when you sort of talked about the hippie movement. Fundamentalism does challenge modernism kind of full stop for control of what's going on. And the hippies, they had a counterculture. They didn't like what was going on in modern society. They challenged it as well. But there was a big difference in that they rejected modern society and just sort of turn their backs on it

and want to create a new way for themselves, like their own utopia, which obviously was never going to happen. God bless the hippies. But that's what they tried to do at least. What they didn't do was try and say, everybody should be hippies. We want to take control of the government and tell everyone that they should lead a hippie lifestyle. Right. Through like laws and violence, right? Right. Yeah. So what's interesting, Chuck, is what the hippies were espousing as a counterculture was what fundamentalism was doing starting in 1925 to basically 1980 in the US as a counterculture. They went off and established their own counterculture. Again, their own schools, their own media. It wasn't until they became politically active that they became that second

wave where they actively were trying to take over the society in order to steer it away from modernity and toward Christianity. And again, they keep saying we want to steer it back into Christianity. That's something that's super up for debate as well is just how Christian was America before. And our fundamentalists steering us backward or is this a whole new modern direction that we've never been in before? And scholars say definitely the latter of those two. Yeah, for sure. And we'll talk a little bit about that later. But some of the traits of fundamentalist groups, and again, this is this can be any kind of fundamentalism all around the world. But one we've already kind of talked about is they're reactive to crises. And that's when,

you know, I sort of mentioned when they feel like they're being specifically threatened by maybe a law or anything really, or a movement or a group, another group, then they try to sort of overcome that with power. And of course, now with politics, McCarthyism is a really good example there. I mean, the Cold War created a lot of different kinds of fundamentalism. McCarthyism certainly was one of them. Yeah. And so like a fundamentalist movement might rise on its own just in times of uncertainty. But when things are really uncertain for a lot more people, that's when they start to attract more and more followers. Right. There's also a big component of fundamentalism that is a reliance on simplistic solutions, right? So like, yeah, the world is huge and complex and scary.

But all you have to do is listen to the literal word of God or follow the original wording of the Constitution. And all of your questions will be answered. You don't even have to think about anything. Just follow the word. And that's another hallmark of fundamentalism is you are basically blind obedience to some leadership and or set of doctrines. And that's one of the reasons that it makes it so attractive. Like you don't have to think about the world. You don't have to wonder about the world and why it's so scary and why it doesn't make sense. Things are the way they are because that's how they are. That's how they're supposed to be. Like men are more important than women because God made us that way. Like that level of thinking and like

you just put a period on the end and you don't have to wonder any longer why a man is more important than a woman in America these days. That's just that. And that's a really big attraction of fundamentalism to people. It's like remember King of the Hill. Oh yeah. So Bill Dothriev his buddy. I remember once he said he missed being in the army because they took the guesswork out of living. And like fundamentalism does that for its followers. Like they tell them what the answers are and you don't have to think about it yourself. Yeah. That's good. I have a friend who I won't name who his big gripe is when he talks to his you know he's sort of the black sheep of his family and that they don't align politically.

But he says when he tries to challenge them with actual facts and things he said they always say the same thing. They just sort of turn their head and go I don't know about that. And that's sort of the I mean the perfect distillation of simplistic thinking is when met with literal facts and data just you know I don't know about that. Like basically what they're saying is I don't want that threatens me. I don't want to talk about that. Right. And I'm not curious about getting to the bottom of this. I'm not curious about your viewpoint. I'm not curious about my own viewpoint. I don't want it to be challenged. Let's stop talking. What is that? A thought terminating something. Somebody wrote in and told us once about. Oh yeah. Like a thought terminating

statement or something. Yeah. Like let's agree to disagree which I still think is valid. But yeah. I get it. I think maybe that's a last resort sort of thing so you don't like start punching each other. Exactly. It goes hand in hand with digging your fingertips into the arm of the chair. Exactly. Does someone smell burning sawdust? Oh Josh is just across the bar. Another sort of fundamentalist trait that can happen is it's not always but it's a lot of times it's anti-science but at the same time and we've talked about this a little bit here and there is it can go the other way. There are some people that are dogmatically fundamentalist believers in science to a degree that is maybe helpful. Yeah. That basically

goes away from the concept of science. That science is constantly looking for new answers and everything and a lot of dogmatic science people are like no this is it and let's not let's stop thinking about it anymore and if you challenge it I'm not tolerant of that and you're wrong. That is out there but it's an aberration I think for the most part it is an anti-science kind of thing because science is part of modernization of society and so that makes it an enemy. It's an enemy especially of Christianity or other religions as far as fundamentalism goes. Yeah for sure and then the last couple of things kind of go hand in hand is a lot of time fundamentalists can be conspiracy oriented. A lot of paranoia sort of dwelling

about the and it all comes from it all stems from them feeling threatened about X, Y or Z and then they usually rally around some sort of charismatic leader. Whatever the group is wherever whether it's the Khomeini even though that didn't maybe didn't translate to America as being a charismatic leader he certainly had his followers but it's usually a man they usually authoritarians and charismatic they usually are bullies in some way or the other and a lot of times fundamentalists look at these people and admire them like kind of wish they were like them like they're doing the things that we would do if we were in power. Yeah like I like a guy who can get up there and talk about beating up our critics because I wish I could punch him in

the face and he's talking about it and that makes me feel so good yeah that kind of thing and that conspiracy thing in particular I was reading about that there's a huge overlap that's developed between QAnon beliefs and evangelical Christianity and they have a lot in common about like end times, apocalypticism. There's a lot of overlap but one of the things that I think is starting to become apparent is that people of faith especially fundamentalists because they are maybe the most people of the most faithful of the faithful are possibly more susceptible to conspiracy theories because literalist religion whereas like your religious text is infallible there's no mistakes in it it means everything literally and where science or physics contradicts

it science as physics is wrong that level of belief and something like QAnon that's just that out there require faith and if you're already faithful to something like that you it's apparently are more susceptible to things like conspiracy theories that require you to ignore facts and just take things on faith and that that has kind of infected evangelicalism something like I think I saw on a 538 blog that like a quarter of evangelicals in America believe in QAnon too which is that's a tremendous amount of people I think a third of people in America are evangelicals so a quarter of that third bully subscribed to QAnon beliefs. Well yeah and here's something I don't think we maybe have hammered home enough is that there is a large portion of American

religious people who are not fundamentalists and who did since the beginnings of modernization try and roll with it and say well you know what maybe the Bible isn't to be taken so literally maybe these are allegories and metaphors maybe Noah didn't literally take two of every living thing maybe this Red Sea didn't literally part maybe these are all stories that we should draw inspiration or our way of looking at the world from and and believe in science and they're compatible right not compatible compatible there are that is a very huge part of of religion so we're not painting religion with this single brush here we're not about one one part of it not at all and some of the most vocal and outspoken opponents and scholars of fundamentalism are

religious groups because you've got progressives and moderates in any given religion and they've got fundamentalists who are trying to take over take control of their religious group and that's a problem for them and it was evangelicals moderate and liberal evangelicals who started telling the rest of the world like hey QAnon is making serious headways into our our religious group and it's a big problem and we need to figure out what's going on here they were the ones who told everybody else basically yeah and those fundamentalists the progressive non-literalists are in a way their enemy as well of the fundamentalists you know like within their own religion the the progressive non-literalists of like you know the people say like well maybe we

should take the bible as just metaphor right their their enemies of the fundamentalists yeah absolutely and again that's where it started back in the 1870s to 1925 that was the original split right yeah exactly it was a struggle within the baptists and the Presbyterians for control over the baptists and the Presbyterians these fundamentalists came up and said stop accommodating modern society you're straying away from the word and their beliefs just got harder and harder and harder and more and more and more literal and they were a huge problem for the baptists and the Presbyterians for a while yeah for sure all right let's take our final break and we'll talk about what history thinks about fundamentalism right after this

hey i'm lance bass host of the new i hard podcast frosted tips with lance bass the hardest thing could be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road uh okay i see what you're doing do you ever think to yourself what advice would lance bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation if you do you've come to the right place because i'm here to help this i promise you oh god seriously i swear and you won't have to send an sos because i'll be there for you oh man and so my husband michael um hey that's me yep we know that michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step oh not another one kids relationships life in general can get messy you may be thinking

this is the story of my life just stop now if so tell everybody yeah everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye listen to frosted tips with lance bass on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts i'm mangesh atika there and to be honest i don't believe in astrology but from the moment i was born it's been a part of my life in india it's like smoking you might not smoke but you're gonna get secondhand astrology and lately i've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it so i rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you

it got weird fast tantric curses major league baseball teams canceled marriages k-pop but just when i thought i had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology my whole world can crash down situation doesn't look good there is risk to father and my whole view on astrology it changed whether you're a skeptic or a believer i think your ideas are going to change too listen to skyline drive and the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts so chuck we talked about how fundamentalist groups say they claim that they're taking society back to like this golden ages era where things were the way that the fundamentalist wanted them before right and that doesn't seem to be true but again fundamentalists seem to be a modern

phenomenon taking us in directions that we've never been in before where the fundamentalists are the ones in charge right and one of the ways that they do that is by selectively citing stuff in religious texts or in historical documents that support their ideas and the christian american christian fundamentalists love to do that with like historical documents from the founding of the united states and even back when the united states was just some colonies as british colonies yeah because a lot of those documents say the word god and mention god uh whether it's the the charter the original charter for virginia in the early 1600s to george washington saying that the the drafting in the constitution was an event that was in the

hand of god um fundamentalists say hey george washington is george washington he also mentioned god and it's also he also says that you shouldn't compromise because uh the constitution was written in the in the hand of god and so that kind of ticks all the boxes as far as drawing a line in the sand right but again all this stuff is sort of out of context and when you go back and you look at what the original charter of virginia meant and why it was written or what george washington meant and what ultimately made it into the constitution which was not the word god you really got to look at that in context like what was what was the deal with a virginia charter so the virginia charter said that one of the colonists goals was to propagate the christian

religion to the indigenous people that they met there although they didn't call them indigenous people um and if you look at the virginia charter from 1606 it was written by people who were british who were corporate shareholders who lived in london who were ruled by the crown and their aim was not to form a new nation and just um christianizing the indigenous people they met they're just added legitimacy to this commercial pursuit that they were undertaking it's it's it's pretty flimsy as far as like a proof that america was founded as a christian nation that fundamentalists need to take back yeah yeah that's a good point and like i said the word god didn't make it into the constitution the word science did and section eight article one uh promote the progress of science and useful

arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries um and you know america may have been founded on christian principles but this is important very early on you know i think what was it like 150 years after the puritan colony of plimoth was was founded the christian experiment and government in america was over and they said no we're gonna found the federal government and thomas jefferson said we're gonna separate church and state because we're going down a bad road yeah even if you know george washington meant what he said about being in the hand of god and he was a christian and a lot of the other founding fathers were christians and um they had christian beliefs but when it came time to found the united

states of america it's not like they hadn't considered like they hadn't even crossed their mind to to found a christian nation there had been christian governments in north america already and they said no we're going to abandon that and go a different direction so literally america was purposefully not founded as a christian nation it could have been had every opportunity to be and it wasn't and the point is i mean chuck we could make an entire spinoff podcast just going tit for tat on on context and literalism with fundamentalism but the the point is societies evolve so it doesn't matter what was going on 400 years ago like yes they did a really good job writing the constitution founding some some or creating some really great guiding documents

but society has evolved since then it's become much more diverse much more culturally rich and we've just changed most people say for the better and there's a lot wrong with it with modern society there's a lot right that if you had the choice you would not want to go back to 1606 and live um compared to today yeah and modernism is really um basically what sociologists think is why fundamentalism still exist is is a response to modernization right and you know modernization has it's ups and it's downs over the years it's hasn't been perfect uh pre-modernization though there was people are a lot more the same uh they you know we've talked about this before you know pre-urban uh sort of factory work settings people lived on farms they lived on on the land

and work the land and they lived in the fields and they were a lot more alike and they were a lot more like sort of the same group of people and industrialization came along and it fragmented society and entirely different people started to become people like it changed the way people were it didn't just change how they went to work and where they lived all that inherently changed what people could be like and uh social values changed and that's a part of modernization and you know for better or for worse we it is is fragmented us and there's been a lot of negative aspects to it but it's also come along with protection of civil rights and uh racial and gender equality and uh you know the the worldwide web which is you know we can all

agree is the best thing ever right it's flawless no downside but but yeah i mean you it would be ridiculous to say that modern society is just you know perfect or even generally better in every single way no there's plenty of stuff that's wrong with it like um the the emphasis on industry and profits and and um can can be really isolating and make people feel like there's there they're just basically a cog in a machine that's a big problem but yes there are there are plenty of solutions and plenty of things that have gotten better too and one of the things about modern society is that we have brought more and more different people together who have more and more different ideas and experiences and it's become clear that no one group is right

or has all the answers or is the guardians of the truth it's just been shown not to be correct and um these a pair of sociologists kind of put it uh michael o emerson and david hartman they said when when you have when you bring together people of differing views and values what rise to the top as shared values are tolerance and acceptance and that these become the core values of highly modernized societies and that is great for most of us but if you're a fundamentalist that is the opposite of great that is the opposite direction that you're supposed to be going because not everybody's right we're the only ones that are right all of you are wrong and you're wrong in a really terrible way that we have to change so we have to take over society yeah i mean

you know one of the big threats to fundamentalists and why they've uh i think dug in more and more over the years is it's science is coming along to demystify a lot of the things since the dawn of time that were you know took took tried to explain you know the seasons and rain and thunder and death and you know in various ways and people since then have been trying to explain that stuff then science progresses and comes along says oh wait a minute you know we can explain natural selection now we can explain gravity we can explain electromagnetism and you know we know why the apple falls from the tree it doesn't have to be some magical thing or some religious allegory and so what that does is that pushes religion out a little bit because fewer people needed it

to explain things which can be a big part of religion and all of a sudden religion wasn't like the overriding fabric of society but it was just a part of society right and that that's a big threat to a fundamentalist yeah because a lot of people just say okay well science makes a lot of sense to me I'm not going to abandon my religious beliefs I still believe in God and Jesus or Muhammad or Buddha I like I'm going like you said earlier I find those things compatible not compatible but there's a group of people who are just find this unbearable modern society is just unbearable it doesn't make sense I don't know the people who live around me I'm not valued like I used to be or like my great great grandfather was that my wife is working out of the house

what's up with that kind of thing and rather than their their beliefs loosening and progressing they actually become more inflexible more rigid as as society continues to progress and their beliefs are left behind because they feel left behind so they actually come to rail against society and that these are the people who become fundamentalists so part of it is feeling left out left behind or opposed by society in general that's part of it but then also part of it is that attraction of you know somebody having all the answers and a really frankly confusing period of history which is what we're in right now yeah and you know when people get together and isolate themselves from others and say we're the only ones that are right and hey we need to get involved in politics

and get a candidate that things like us out there you kind of get where we are today which is like you said it's a pretty oh what's the word scary is too easy snafu uncertain yeah I mean it is uncertain like things are changing so fast right now it's totally understandable why fundamentalist movements would be swelling it's as scary as heck right now I feel like the world is way more nuts than it was maybe 30 years ago yeah maybe that's true maybe it's not it seems like it to me and I think it's because of this incredibly rapid social change for me society is generally going in the direction that I agree with so I'm not threatened by it even though I'm still just overwhelmed by how fast things are changing and then also by how much tension there is from opposing sides to that

change it's a really unsettling and unsettled time I think so I can totally understand why fundamentalism would be so attractive to so many people right now but again one of the tenets of fundamentalism Chuck is if you can't take over the ship sink it that's that's basically the second wave fundamentalism in a nutshell so they it can't be ignored society can't just ignore it we have to figure out what to do about fundamentalist impulses and there's some good ideas some not good ideas and some that may be worth trying and not worth trying but we're still kind of in the very beginning stages of figuring out how to reconcile modernized society with fundamentalist impulses got any ideas well I saw one pair of sociologists who wrote a book suggested that

everybody should just read more fiction okay I couldn't believe that idea that was they meant that literally because they they say that if you read more fiction it can kind of transport you into other people's experiences and points of view and will foster tolerance which again intolerance is the hallmark of fundamentalism I'll throw one out there I just thought of off the dome okay travel someplace that you may not ordinarily travel it's a big one or travel someplace period yeah if you can I know it's a financial burden for some and now everyone can just like jet off to Paris to see how the Parisians live no but it turns out you are allowed to leave Ohio oh no I can see that oh that's true another thing that they say can help is to be more tolerant yourself and to be

friendly and to approach a fundamentalist with friendship because one kind of criticism you'll hear from fundamentalists is sort of thrown at right back in the face of a non-fundamentalist and say you're just as intolerant of my beliefs as I am of yours I think the counter to that would be to say well know what we're intolerant of is your extreme intolerance which is a big distinction yeah and this is like you're intolerant of my racism it's like that's not a great argument yeah but that's like one of those things that's like okay well yeah you can't just be tolerant of everything like there is a line and like you know racism is a really good example of that it's a really great line that society shouldn't just be tolerant of that but you know how can you figure out

how to apply tolerance to the people who feel that way like can right can you be tolerant on an individual level as as their neighbor or their co-worker or the fellow grocery store shopper to where you can display some form of tolerance with them without supporting or allowing their their you know tolerance for their beliefs of their racist beliefs you know it's it's I think the reason why we are not a fundamentalist podcast Chuck is because we're not saying this is the answer this is this is what you do there aren't any answers right now but there's a lot of different ideas floating around that could work or might not I think music can be a uniter I think sports fandom can be a uniter yeah I mean you'll never see a more tolerant

harmonious place than like at a falcons game in the south in the deep south you know black and white people like urban versus some of the most rural redneck-y type folks you could imagine sure like arm and arm for the same cause and it's a dumb football game but like there are small lessons to be found I think in those situations oh yeah for sure I remember reading a study years back that people who were super racist who lived in towns where like Hispanic I can never remember Latin Latinx people had come to live there was like a large population of Latinx people to where they lived among them were they might still support like immigration policies or anti-immigration policies but they would be like but not my town like they had developed

tolerance without even realizing it and their their overall beliefs hadn't caught up yet so maybe they were still voting one way but as far as that person that they knew down the street they were not about to let that person get deported not my town kind of thing and yeah so I think whether it's a falcons game or like a musical rock concert bringing people of you know disparate backgrounds together does foster tolerance I think too and you know it may not I'm not saying that these people of the falcons game walk out of there forging lifelong friendships and they're like you know what why don't we get together tomorrow for lunch but you know there are there are small experiences that maybe can add up to something at some point

right in life I don't know I'm like I feel desperate for people to get along better yeah for sure and there are people out there who are saying like what are you talking about no we should not even be we should be isolating people with racist beliefs no it's not enough to just have somebody like have fun at a falcons game like we're way beyond that point and I mean I get that argument too like I don't necessarily subscribe to it but I can get how people are like no we're at like five alarm stage we need to figure out huge radical responses of fundamentalism right now because they're knocking at the door of our the highest levels of government and if they're an infection on society we've got huge problems because they are growing and gaining

strength so I totally get both both arguments are both ways yeah one other thing Chuck I think yeah one more thing um so religion has a place in modernized society it helps people from feeling totally crazy if you need a sense of community go join a religious group that's like a built-in ready-made community for you who's going to accept you into it absolutely moderate and progressive I should say groups but there's the religion doesn't have to be the only institution in society that addresses things like angst and unease and you know a need for reassurance like what if society what if what if science what if um I don't culture in general just kind of undertook this project of finding meaning in this crazy modern world and like helping reassure people

like that's what people join fundamentalist movements for is reassurance ultimately that is the basis of joining a fundamentalist movement they they want to feel reassured that everything's going to be okay and if you can find equally reassuring alternatives to fundamentalism I would guess that fundamentalism I don't think it would ever fully go away there's always going to be fundamentalists but they would be so increasingly small and insular that you could conceivably just generally let them do their own thing and tolerate them maybe so okay that's it okay he said with a resigned sigh well I'm just gonna ask just to button it up you got anything else I got nothing else I don't either Chuck if you on know more about fundamentalism start

researching it there's a lot out there that will probably open your eyes and since I said open your eyes it's time for a listener mail this is about vasectomies oh yeah and by the way we heard from a few dudes that are that already have said and this is day one of getting emails in real time that hey vasectomies aren't quite as painless as y'all made it out to be by the way I guess it can vary obviously from person to person but sure we've had quite a few guys that are like it heard bad for a couple of days and I was very uncomfortable for a couple of weeks poor guys so just wanted to say that hey guys listen to the vasectomy episode I have to say you're doing a great service by disseminating this information I'm a 26 year old who's been with my wife for

almost nine years we've talked oh well got married young good for you yeah we talked about not wanting children for years but made the jump to getting vasectomy in July for me it was relatively painless but for the rest of that day it did feel like I someone had landed a low blow punch the next day I had a little pain with the use of ice packs it was fine and by day three I was back to exercising after a couple of months I feel psychologically and sexually liberated our friends stated their concerns on how we would move on if regret crept in since we made this decision about not wanting children having biological children is not a concern and if we ever regret it because life is never definite we can look at adopting nice highly got all the answers he should start a fundamentalist

group got all the answers you guys mentioned that should be called a vasotomy because there isn't anything removed but with my procedure and for others I've seen on the youtube they remove about one centimeter of the vase completely and send it to a tissue sampling so technically ectomy still works in this case oh thank you for the years of knowledge and entertainment you too put special comfort in the podcast realm wishing you unburdened ejaculations uh that is from Ryan very nice Ryan thank you and for uh everyone here in the united states about one centimeter of vast differences.393700787 inches well done uh if you want to be like Ryan and share your view points and have us be like wow this guy really knows what he's talking about you can send us an

email too and guy of course is as always gender neutral because we're in a modern society and we love that fact anyway you can send us that email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com stuff you should know is a production of i heart radio for more podcasts my heart radio visit the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows hey i'm lance bass host of the new i heart podcast frosted tips with lance bass do you ever think to yourself what advice would lance bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation if you do you've come to the right place because i'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life tell everybody yeah everybody

about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye listen to frosted tips with lance bass on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts i'm munga shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe you can find in major league baseball international banks k-pop groups even the white house but just when i thought i had a handle on this subject something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed whether you're a skeptic or a believer give me a few minutes because i think your ideas are about to change too listen to skyline drive on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts