Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Raissa Mendes
Well, we all have a kind of stereotype of fundamentalism and of fundamentalists
in our heads somewhere,
and that stereotype probably includes something like:
a fundamentalist is someone who's very literal-minded,
someone who believes, for example,
in the absolutely inerrant and almost dictated version of the Bible,
dictated by God.
A fundamentalist is someone who has a very strong sense of categories --
good and evil; black and white; my friends, my enemies;
the solution to the problem is my way or the highway.
And there's a certain amount of truth to that stereotype,
but, as with any stereotype, it can only go so far.
One of the great gifts of my life
was that I was born into a fundamentalist family,
but it took me several decades of my life to understand exactly how that was true.
I was born into the family of my grandparents and my parents.
My granddad was a man named John R. Rice,
who was the founding editor of The Sword of The Lord Newspaper,
one of the most prominent fundamentalist Christian journals of the 20th century.
My grandparents had six daughters.
Every single one of their six daughters grew up, went to Wheaton College
and married a Baptist preacher.
One of those Baptist preachers was my dad.
In addition, I have multiple other male members of my family
who are Baptist preachers:
my grandfather, my great-grandfather, my father, my brother,
eight or nine uncles depending on how you count an uncle --
(Laughter)
countless cousins, nephews, and so on, and so on.
I'm the only one, in my generation at least, of the family
who stepped out of that tradition.
So, I'm kind of the black sheep of the family.
Instead, when I was growing up as a teenager in the South,
I became entranced with and inspired by the civil rights movement
and then the anti-war movement and, by the time I was in high school,
I was attending civil rights demonstrations,
in opposition to the will and inclination of my family.
I then grew up radically estranged from my family,
and our tradition, and our history,
believing in fact that most of what my granddad believed in, and stood for,
and fought for was wrong,
and that I, in contrast to him, was right.
So, when I went home for Christmas
-- and I'd continued to maintain that slim connection with my family every year --,
we would talk about the weather, or sports, or what was for dinner,
but we rarely, if ever, talked about culture, politics, religion,
or anything that might lead to any amount of conflict.
My mother was probably the most difficult person for me
to learn how to deal with in my life.
She was, on the one hand, funny, warm-hearted, enthusiastic.
She loved to be around people.
When she was a young woman, she said,
"You know, when I grow up, I want to have 12 children, an even dozen."
So, clearly, she loved the idea of children at least.
(Laughter)
I was the third of her children.
I was the first boy in my generation of the family,
so the first male descendant of my granddad,
the famous fundamentalist.
And so, it was expected that I would grow up
to follow in the footsteps of my dad, my granddad, my great-granddad, and so on,
and it was a great disappointment to everybody when I did not.
But, along with all of my mom's great positive attributes,
she was also difficult for me to live with.
I found that my mother, more than anybody in my life,
knew how to make me mad faster than anybody else.
And a fundamentalist is somebody who essentially knows how to get angry.
(Laughter)
As a matter of fact,
there's a well-known writer, George Marsden,
who's written extensively on the history of fundamentalism in America,
and his definition of a fundamentalist is "an evangelical who's mad."
(Laughter)
I got to know my mother a little bit better
over the last couple of years of her life.
I heard the following story, the story that I'm about to tell you,
just two years ago, at Christmas time,
and it just came out of nowhere.
The story was, when I was a little boy, we lived for a few years in Kansas.
My dad was the pastor
of a string of little, tiny, very poor Baptist churches.
The churches were so poor
that they could rarely, if ever, offer a salary of any kind to my dad.
One little church in Treece, Kansas,
I think the salary my dad claimed was $11 or $12 a month.
On Sunday evenings, the people from the church would come,
each one bringing a can or a little bag of rice,
and they would put it in a cardboard box in the basement for the pastor,
and we would collect that box and take it home.
That would be what the church called its love offering to our family,
the pastor's family.
We were poor enough that, at one point in our lives in Treece,
the water was shut off in our house
and my mother would take a pail at midnight
and sneak next door to the neighbor's house
and turn on their spigot and fill the pail and bring it back to our house.
My mother had four children,
the last one of the four in Kansas,
and then another 15 years went by, or 13 years went by,
before she had another child.
In the meantime, beginning in that little town in Kansas,
she had miscarriages.
Her first miscarriage, she was four months pregnant,
and she gave up that little stillborn baby at four months
and then wrapped it in a blanket,
handed the blanket with the baby to my father,
who took it into the backyard of our house,
where he had dug a hole next to the ramshackle garage,
and he buried the child there.
None of us heard that story until a couple of years ago.
About ten years ago, my mother came to Seattle for a visit,
and she came with me to a party,
a fundraising party for a nonprofit organization that I was a volunteer for.
And I introduced my mom to two dear friends of mine,
Cambria and Robyn, who were a lesbian couple
who had been in a committed relationship for years at that point
and had been trying to have a baby.
Robyn was four months pregnant
and, on the afternoon she met my mom, she had a miscarriage.
And I introduced Cambria and Robyn to my mom,
and these three women sat on the couch, in the middle of the house,
holding hands and crying.
Every time, over the next ten years, the last ten years,
when I saw Cambria or Robyn,
each one of them would say, "How is your mom?"
And when I went home to Chattanooga and I would sit with my mom,
she would say, "How are Cambria and Robyn?"
And I never thought too much about it, I didn't really understand it,
until after she died about a month ago, my mom.
I realized that, on that couch that afternoon, in that moment,
my mother was not trying to judge anyone, convert anyone, convince anyone,
or look down on anyone,
or attempt to tell them how they were doing anything wrong.
She was just there to love them.
I know that that was a challenge for her.
For example,
years ago, I remember my daughter, at the age of about 15,
announce that she was a vegetarian.
And she was home for Christmas
and my mom took her Bible and took Amber aside
and pointed out one scripture after another
that purported to prove that God disapproved of vegetarianism -
(Laughter)
beginning with the story of Cain and Abel -
(Laughter)
and then on through the Bible.
(Laughter)
But my mother was someone
who, through all of that difficulty and all of that pain,
had her heart broken time and time again.
The conventional image of heartbreak, I think,
is of a heart that has had so much pain
that it explodes or breaks apart, in a violent way,
and the shards of the heart go flying in every direction
and end up damaging those whom we love, or our neighbors,
or even people on the other side of the globe.
As our country.
We had as a country, as a community, our heart broken by 9/11,
and we ended up invading Iraq, a country on the other side of the world,
that had nothing to do with the destruction of the Twin Towers.
So, in that moment, for my mom, on that couch,
she was emerging from a kind of fundamentalism
and entering a different kind of fundamentalism.
In the Bible,
Jesus was asked, "What are the commandments that matter?"
And Jesus said there are really only two commandments that matter at all.
Nothing else is important.
Two commandments are fundamental,
and the first of those is, "Love your neighbor -,"
or rather, "Love the Lord, your God,
with all your heart, all your mind and all your soul."
And the second one is, "Love your neighbor as yourself."
"Love your neighbor as yourself,"
the very heart, the fundamental concept or precept
of every single one of the major spiritual traditions we have on Earth.
A couple of years ago,
at TED.com, Karen Armstrong introduced the Charter for Compassion,
which closes with these words,
"Born of our deep interdependence,
compassion is essential to human relationships
and to fulfilled humanity.
It's the path to enlightenment
and indispensable to the creation of a just economy
and a peaceful global community."
I'm certain that my fundamentalist mom
would be in full agreement with those words.
Thank you.
(Applause)