In part 1 of this article, “What is religious fundamentalism?” I looked at how religious fundamentalism is one of the methods whereby people attempt to place version control on a story-system to keep it from being modified too far away from it’s official version.

That description makes it sound a little more intentional of an activity than I think it really is. For the average fundamentalist of any religion, they don’t necessarily need to actively “protect” the purity of their story-system. A lot of that activity will be done on a completely automatic pre-conscious level.

Stories have, what I like to call, their “brand identity.” Once you are acquainted with a story-system, you can usually tell right away what fits inside of that system and what does not. Like if you say something along the lines of, “Jesus was a space alien who came here in a UFO,” you can immediately see that this doesn’t fit within the brand identity of (mainstream) Christianity. Or if you were to conjure up the image of Luke Skywalker with fairy wings, riding on a unicorn on a rainbow. Immediately, that gets thrown out as preposterous, based on what you know about Star Wars. The reason I refer to this phenomen on as “brand identity” is because companies strive very diligently to maintain, in the eyes of their consumers, a particular sense of what their product is all about. Through advertising, companies create a story-system. They have to be sure that while their new ads serve as novel re-introductions to their brand of products, they are also not so strange and new as to bewilder people. Just imagine what would happen if you saw a commercial for Coca-Cola where somebody was smoking out of a crack pipe in a dimly lit tenement, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

In the case of religious story-systems, this phenomenon of “brand identity” recognition is frequently built upon and played upon by the religion itself. The simplest and most common way to do this is through the concept of “evil.” This idea about story-systems having brand identity implies that there are things which fall comfortably within a story, while there are other things which do not mesh with it and are forced to remain outside the story. If your story-system is also a worldview, this may lead to trouble, because it emphasizes an awareness that there is a reality outside your religion. The idea of evil helps to conquer that. What evil allows people to do is to take elements which do not logically fit or make sense in their story-system, and instead of rejecting them outright (which would threaten the overall integrity of their system), these elements are assigned a sort of catch-all category: Evil.

Again, consider the notion that “Jesus was a space alien who came here in a UFO.” Rather than just thinking that this is a ridiculous incongruity, a very strict fundamentalist might try to classify this idea as “evil.” This allows them to automatically neutralize new ideas which they are uncomfortable with, because they do not fit squarely into their established system of belief.

The flip-side to using evil as a sort of “miscellaneous” holding-category for negatives and misfit ideas, is that fundamentalists will also do the same thing with certain positive concepts as well. You could look at “miracles” from this angle - as positive events or ideas which they encounter, but which do not fit perfectly fit within their story-system. Just think of how many times you’ll hear Christians talk about how “God moves in mysterious ways.” This is an implicit recognition of the fact that the religious story-system which they constructed does not always accurately account for everything they encounter, whether negative or positive.

Brand identity and evil, together, help to form a sort of “cultural immune system” which protects the “purity” of a story-system and helps assert version control. This ties in neatly with cognitive dissonance theory, which basically says that people have a sort of inertial relationship with new ideas. Rather than restructure established mental-emotional connections based on newly received information, it is easier to just avoid new information to begin with, or ignore it once you receive it (selective exposure & retention). In systems theory, this also connects to the idea of how a negative feedback loop serves to maintain a system’s equilibrium or homeostasis.

Of course, the drive to maintain one pure version of a story is only one of several aspects of interacting with stories. Next time, I’ll explore some which embrace dissonance and modification.