I was provoked by this uninspired LA Times Op Ed, which I read about at All Intensive Purposes, to make my own attempt at fingering the distinction between religious people on one side of the religiously hot political issues--stem-cells, abortion rights, same-sex marriage--and the religious people on the other side. By convention I think we distinguish one side as "the religious fundamentalists." But that seems like more of an operational definition than an explanation, and it also seems to credit some sects as better grasping the essence of their scripture.
In past posts here and elsewhere I've attributed opposition to stem cells and to early abortions to belief in a soul or souls. Now I think it may be more exact to attribute the opposition to something vaguer--mystical belief. Many people, whether they practice organized religion or not, believe that some physical things in the world (e.g. their own bodies) have, in addition another unmeasurable, unobservable, uncharacterizable, unintelligible ("ineffable" or "divine") aspect, which they believe (or at least believe they believe) is as real as the bus that might be about to run them over. In the case of live and thinking human bodies, and in particular their brains, the ineffable divine stuff is their souls--or else the universal soul. Soul seems to be associated with nerve cell signals and circuit architecture, with the underlying biological tissue and with embryonic clusters of undifferentiated cells and biological derivatives thereof. In regard to those books that say "Holy Bible" on the cover, the divine stuff is "the Word," which is in the ink and/or in the paper and/or in the abstract information expressed by the text and/or copies and translations of that text. So divine stuff has a mishmash of superficially, physically inconsistent relations to things, which goes along with its ineffability, and to regard it as real is an extraordinary mental feat. The people who pull this off I would label "mystics" or "mystical believers."
That said, I don't think you need to be a mystic to be a fundamentalist or to vote fundamentalist. You might just belong to a mystical denomination. Most religious traditions seem to have now or have had in the past a mystical branch (e.g. of the Sufis, Tantric Buddhists, Hassids). The evangelical tongues-speaking Christian churches that Americans call "fundamentalist" sure seem to qualify as mystic. And we know where they stand on the issues cited up top.
Given that many people I am placing in the mystic camp are simply followers and not mystically minded themselves, I suppose my politically distinguishing principle isn't any more pure and psychological than the one the Times Op-edder proposed, which was affiliation with one of two stances toward scripture...which goes with denomination. I guess all I have to add is that I'd call one of those stances or styles "mystic." Where's Karen Armstrong when you need her?
