If you haven’t been with us since Rosh Hashanah, our theme this year is “Hear O’Israel,” and I’ve been enlisting the help of music to set the tone for each sermon. So far we’ve heard the words of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” where we talked about removing the blame game when addressing the world’s problems. We heard Buffalo Springfield’s “For What it’s Worth,” and talked about the dangers of Jingoism and aggressive patriotism in making our country toxic. And tonight, we will hear something a little different:
[Plays Sam Cooke’s What a Wonderful World]
Don’t know much about history
Don’t know much biology
Don’t know much about a science book,
Don’t know much about the French I took
But I do know that I love you,
And I know that if you love me, too,
What a wonderful world this would be
Now, this is, at face value, a very sweet love song, right? Well, don’t get too comfortable. I’m a huge fan of Sam Cooke, and it’s very catchy isn’t it? But as I listened to the lyrics this year, I realized that slowly, over the past decade, this song has become the perfect theme song, not for high school lovers, but for someone else entirely: the modern fundamentalist.
There is a movement in our country, and the world, which rejects a well-rounded secular education, and values only a limited, fundamentalist approach to understanding. We see this in spiritual fundamentalism such as in the ultra-Orthodox of Judaism, in Christian Evangelicals, and within Muslim extremists. History, science, psychology, the knowledge of other cultures are all rejected to embrace, instead, interpretation and, I would argue, misinterpretation of the bible. And we see it in secular fundamentalism, where the bible is traded in for “pseudoscience” on message boards. Whether the fundamentalism is religious or secular, we should all agree that rather than, as Sam Cooke sings, creating a wonderful world, fundamentalism risks returning us toward the Dark Ages.
So what happens when you don’t know much about history? Well it means that you don’t see history repeating itself, you don’t know the consequences of what occurred the last time, and like when Hitler invaded Russia in the winter, ignoring the history of when Napoleon tried the same thing, you find the world you’ve created for yourself to be cold and harsh. For example, we have seen a rise in interest in Biblical Literacy in America’s schools, with states like Florida, Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Alabama, Iowa, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky all introducing and passing legislation to allow the teaching of Bible classes in public schools. As Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, recently stated “State legislators should not be fooled that these bills are anything more than part of a scheme to impose Christian beliefs on public schoolchildren.” And Laser is right. We have seen what happens when Christianity or any other religion is forced into the public sphere. Misunderstood and incorrectly taught Gospels swarming with anti-Jewish sentiment invade the minds of our youth, non-Christians are discriminated against, and Christian holidays are imposed upon others. We have also seen, since the 2016 election, Christian conservative groups flooding our state legislatures with bills that promote specific agendas. Called “Project Blitz,” fundamentalist groups “provided state politicians with a set of off-the-shelf pro-Christian ‘model bills’” in a 148 page playbook available online. These bills include adding school prayer, denying LGBTQA people rights and recognition instituting conversion therapy as well as adoption refusal for non-Christian babies, or for homosexual couples, and as creating proclamations of religious freedom, Christian heritage, bible in history, and holidays like Christmas.
Friends, these fundamentalists do not know much about history. They have forgotten what happened when Fundamental Christianity took over the State and instituted laws. They forgot about the Council of Elvira, which stated that Christians could not marry Jews, or eat with Jews; they have forgotten about the Visigothic Code which forced Jews to accept Jesus as their savior and to reject Jewish teachings embracing only Christian law; they have forgotten the laws of Pope Innocent which instituted laws forcing Jews to wear different clothing, to be unable to hold public office; they have forgotten about laws from Pope Gregory IX to burn the Talmud; they have forgotten Las siete partidas, the Seven-Part Code in Spain which stated that Jews should live quietly without disturbing the Christians around them, and refrain from preaching, staying inside their houses on Good Friday. These views and these laws, the institution of fundamentalist Christianity mixed with the State, inevitably led to the Crusades in 1096, the Inquisition in 1492, the Chmielnicki massacres in 1648, the Pale of Settlement and the Russian pogroms of the 1800s, and of course the Ghettoization and expulsion and murder of Jews throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The infusion of religion–any religion–into politics, rarely makes politics better.
So, they don’t know much about history. What about biology? Well, we have also seen a sharp rise in our country of anti-abortion legislation specifically and maliciously to target Roe V. Wade. Pushing religious liberty legislation, fundamentalists have attempted to create “heartbeat” and similar bills in Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Georgia and Ohio. If not for the ACLU, these bills, which deny health care to women and ignore the biology of when life begins, reflect a limited understanding of biology. Moreover, they fail to account for the social contexts the surround abortion, including the horrible consequences of back-alley abortions, pregnancies that put the mother’s life at risk, as well as the more gray areas of rape and incest. They don’t know much about biology.
This is to say nothing of the secular but fundamentalist anti-vaxer movement, in which activists have specifically targeted isolated and undereducated communities to help push the regression of modern medicine, opposing vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella, thanks to a debunked study linking vaccines to autism. The former British doctor, Andrew Wakefield, as the U.S. National Library of Medicine reports, “drew severe criticism for his flawed and unethical research methods, which he used to draw his data and conclusions,” and thus caused severe damage in the forms of fundamentalist agendas “skewing science, shifting hypotheses, censoring opposition, attacking critics, claiming to be ‘pro-safe vaccines’, and not ‘anti-vaccine’, claiming that vaccines are toxic or unnatural, and more.” Friends, they don’t know much biology, and it’s very scary stuff.
And what about science books? It has been over thirty years since the U.S. Supreme Court decision Edwards v. Aguillard which “ruled it unconstitutional to require creationism to be taught in public schools” yet we have seen a great deal of fight from anti-evolutionist fundamentalists using the tools of “academic freedom” and “science education” bills, which passed in Louisiana and Tennessee. In fact, right here in Indiana, our State Senator Dennis Kruse wrote a bill that would “allow creationism, or “creation science” to be taught in public schools. It would also require every public school classroom to display a poster or sign with the national motto, “In God We Trust,” as well as the U.S. and Indiana state flags.” This is the same State Senator that “co-authored a bill to require recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in public schools…and tried making it illegal for kids to learn sex ed in school without their parents’ permission.” Fundamentalists like Kruse don’t know much about science books, forgetting that understanding evolution is “critical for understanding biology,” “central to the advancement of medicine,” an “excellent way for students to learn about the process of scientific inquiry,” and holds principles which” underlie improvements in crops, livestock, and farming methods”
And what about the lyric, “Don’t know much about the French I took”? How many of us have seen the videos of Americans verbally abusing immigrants in our country telling them that they need to “speak English” because “this is America.” Aaron Schlossberg, a lawyer in New York, caused a scene when Spanish was spoken; in Kentucky, a woman told Latina customers in a JC Penny to speak English and to “go back to where they belong;” and there have been videos upon videos of white men and women telling Latino, Asian, or Middle-Eastern people to speak English or go home. And while this behavior is not new, as Native American children in this country were once forced to learn English, there is something extremist about the English language in America which differs from our European colleagues. I have cousins who live in Finland and they know 6 languages; most European students learn English, French, German, and Spanish. In fact, it was reported recently that 54% of Europeans are able “to hold a conversation in at least one additional language,” whereas 75% of Americans only speak English. Many states in the U.S. have pushed bills like the “English Language Unity Act” in which “all official functions and proceedings of federal and state government be conducted in English. It would also require that applicants for naturalization be tested on their ability to read and generally understand the English language.” Fundamentalist supporters of this kind of legislation state that failing to force English upon immigrants “discourages assimilation.” Of course, the founding fathers did not put anything in our constitution about having to only speak one language, and over the history of America, with the huge immigration booms from Russia, Ireland, Asia, and Latin American countries, it seems we’ve been doing just fine without English as an official language in America. More importantly, those who are fundamentalist enough to yell at other human beings for not speaking English forget that it turns out being monolinguistic isn’t something to take pride in. It instead takes away our ability to learn about other countries and other cultures; we’re unable to read poetry or literature in their original forms, we’re unable to read historical accounts or even our holy works in their original languages. We miss out on the world when we restrict ourselves to one language, and there’s nothing wrong with speaking in your native language to other native speakers, or keeping part of your history and culture in your homes or with friends.
The point of all this, friends, is that Fundamentalists, whether religious or secular, seem to think that if things were just simple, if they loved God and God loved them, or if they loved America and America loved them, or the like, then what a wonderful world this would be. Well, I’m here to tell you that it wouldn’t be a very wonderful world because we’ve seen what happens when fundamentalists take the wheel in our country and elsewhere. It’s a horrible world. It’s a bloody world. It’s a scary world.
It is why we have to fight, as modern Jews, against these views in our religion and elsewhere. We need to remember that for Jewish people throughout history, education and intellectualism were praised. As a people, we strived to better ourselves, to gain insight into the world, and to work hard to use that knowledge for good so that we could make this world a better place. And Jews were not alone in this endeavor. We can thank our Muslim brethren, for example, for preserving Greek and Roman manuscripts. During the middle ages, for example, when Christianity sought to throw the world into darkness, it was Islam in the Middle East that saved the manuscripts of Aristotle and Plato. Indeed, people of all cultures and backgrounds worked hard to pursue scientific discovery, helping us to uncover the mysteries of nature, space, and humanity.
And because of non-fundamentalist intellectual pursuits, we know that despite what Genesis says, the world was not created 6,000 years ago, but rather it has been floating in space for 4.5 Billion years. And this we know thanks to the evidence found in radiometric age dating and meteorite materials. We also know that Adam did not name the animals, nor did Cain and Abel ride dinosaurs to work. Thanks to the research on genetic mutations and natural selection, we know that evolution occurred and continues to occur. We know these things because of the dedicated men and women who spend years in schooling, training, and in research, going to the ends of the earth to discover incredible knowledge that can be passed down to the students of the world.
Friends, we know that we need to know a lot about history, we need to know a lot of biology, we need to read that science book, we need to remember the French we took. Only then will we learn to love people, and be loved by people, to love our neighbors of different cultures and views. Oh what a wonderful world it would be.