Thoughts on Transcendentalism from a recovering Fundamentalist

I did my first degree at a conservative Bible college. In my first year I would have assented to ‘The Fundamentals’ (the set of essays written from 1910 to 1915) from which ‘Christian fundamentalists’ derive their label. In my second year I began asking awkward questions; these questions slowly drew me away from fundamentalism (or evangelicalism) down broader avenues of enquiry. A question arises in the mind, an unknowing, an opening, and our initial impulse is to find the answer. We’re not seeking the “right” answer per se, rather we gravitate unthinkingly towards answers which sit comfortably alongside all the other “right” answers we’ve already alighted upon. In this way we create a constellation of beliefs which gives us our sense of the world, and a sense of ourselves within it. As I worked my way out of fundamentalism I recognized the folly of this paradigm. How could I possibly assume that there was a natural correlation between what happens to find comfortable lodging in my mind and “reality” (whatever that is)? Indeed, my dalliance with fundamentalism proved to me that I was incapable of such an assessment. I am surely too easily swayed by my own sense of what feels right. And I therefore resolved that I would not simply cast off one set of beliefs for another.

Without knowing it at the time, my thinking was leading me down the rabbit hole of idealism. A belief that whatever “reality” is, it is inaccessible to me. As you might imagine this is a problematic hypothesis to arrive at while studying theology at a conservative bible college. Such a college seeks to assure its students that an inerrant reading of scripture is reasonable. Within the confines of this paradigm, one is taught that an event in the bible is either true or false. The biblical events in question are: the virgin birth, the resurrection, walking on water, water into wine, etc… The classic liberal theological response it to attempt to demystify the event, to come up with some kind of naturalistic explanation. Fundamentalists then respond by discrediting the possibility of any such a naturalistic explanation, and thus in turn reaffirm their inerrant reading. The true or false question seemed to me the wrong question.

Within idealist thought there are two possibilities, either the real world out there doesn’t actually exist at all, it’s all in the mind, or alternatively, it does exist, but we are just completely incapable of accessing it, either with our senses or by way of reason. Now, that seems like an important distinction, but it actually makes little difference. If something is invisible to our senses, what difference does it make if it's real or not? And so, it seemed to me that the most interesting area of enquiry was that infinite playground within, the mind.

As I entered the third year of my degree I had a difficult question to answer - what would be the topic of my dissertation? It was a given that the kind of dissertation topics that most Christian fundamentalists choose were off the table for me; I wasn’t going to write a conservative social issue paper, or a paper defending some Christian fundamental, and so I eventually decided that some kind of history paper was the way to go. The beauty of writing a history paper is that I can explore an interesting time and place, what people thought and believed, but all the while not having to assert my own thoughts and beliefs. There was a lot of talk at the time about slavery, in particular William Wilberforce, the Evangelical Christian who led the British abolitionist movement in the early 19th Century. It was interesting to me that this man would be championed amongst evangelicals for leading the charge against slavery, while at the same time, equally sincere Christians in the United Kingdom and America justified the practice, both sides quoting the bible to make their respective cases.

So, this led me to consider the American abolitionists, which in turn led me to discover Ralph Waldo Emerson and the transcendentalist movement. Although Emerson was writing in a very different time, and responding to very different social issues, I immediately recognized in Emerson a kindred spirit. Emerson (it felt to me) was asking the right kind of questions. Transcendentalism is basically the American branch of idealism, or American Neo-Platonism, or American Romanticism. It emphasizes the importance of one’s own subjective intuition, not as a way of getting at THE external truth (or reality), but rather our interior truth, which on one level sounds very individualistic (and it was), but the irony is, within the depths of our own interiority one finds a broad universality - each is empowered to discover within themselves our shared divine unity. This led the transcendentalists to see the value in social reform, rights of women, labor rights, and of course the abolitionist movement. So, this became my topic: ‘Transcendentalism and the Abolitionist Movement during the Antebellum Period.’

The American Transcendentalist movement from its conception put a very strong emphasis on beauty found in nature, exemplified in Emerson’s book ‘Nature’, as well as Henry David Thoreau’s ‘Walden Pond’, and Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’. Nature as a tool of sorts used to access our interior selves. The idea is that the deepest spiritual truths are not to be found in European religious traditions or Middle Eastern texts, but right here, when we are present to ourselves, and present to nature. This seems to me the great American spiritual insight.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds… With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do…”