A Northwestern University professor is warning that Christian fundamentalists pose more danger to the internal security of the United States than Islamic terrorists pose.
The professor is Catherine M. Wallace, a lecturer of medical education at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
Wallace, herself a Christian, explained her beliefs about Christian fundamentalism earlier this month during a lecture entitled “Confronting Fundamentalism” at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore on the campus of the University of Chicago.
If radical Islamic groups “wanted to attack an American city, they had to hijack an airliner,” Wallace explained, according to The Chicago Maroon, the $67,584-per-year private school’s student newspaper.
“If they want to blow up a concert, they need to put bombs on their own children and send young men in to kill themselves,” she continued.
However, the professor argued, Christian fundamentalists right here in the United States are a “much, much greater threat” because they could — somehow — gain control of nuclear codes.
The history according to Catherine Wallace reads pretty much like the screenplay of Mississippi Burning. It holds that Christian fundamentalism — and the entire “religious right in its most contemporary form” — has a a “transparently racist appeal” and originated in the American South “in Southern opposition to desegregation and to the Civil Rights Movement.”
Beyond a core, existential problem with racism, Wallace suggested that Christian fundamentalism is also exceedingly literal in its interpretation of both the Old and New Testaments.
“Nobody in the ancient world would have read the Bible literally,” she said, according to the Maroon.
“Christian fundamentalism is a malignant form of Christianity,” Wallace also said, declaring that the Christians she opposes foster hate and conflict.
The Bible itself is really great as long as you view it from her perspective, the professor promised.
“It’s the great anthology of Jewish storytelling. It’s brilliant, but these are very ancient stories,” she said.
Wallace’s book series, called “Christian Humanism and the Moral Imagination,” is “absolutely welcoming and accessible to anybody whether they have any religious background or interest,” she boasted.
Wallace also described Jesus Christ as a social justice warrior spouting “socioeconomic justice” and “the just sharing of the world’s resources.”
Presumably, though, according to her own religious framework, nobody at the time took the socioeconomic justice or sharing stuff literally when Jesus talked about it — or for centuries upon centuries thereafter.
Here is Wallace earlier this year giving a TEDx talk she likes to call “Confronting Fundamentalism Together.”
At her website, Wallace argues that “Christianity has been hijacked and weaponized by an alliance between religious fundamentalists and political reactionaries” in recent decades.
“In a series of nimble, tightly focused arguments, I name the moral and intellectual failures of Christian fundamentalism,” she promises.
One of Wallace’s books is titled “Confronting Religious Denial of Gay Marriage.”
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