Religion and Spiritual Integrity
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One persistent response to religious pluralism in American history has been Christian exclusionism, the troop of Christian Hypertheismtrue believers. And as everyone knows,
there are virulent forms of exclusionism found in other religions around the world, (say) Islam, Hinduism, and others. At the political and social level, Christian exclusivism asserts that the United States is in fact, and should be by law, a “Christian nation.” (^10) Non-Christians should stay away or go home;
they are not welcome. Christian exclusionism in its evangelical version asserts that one can only be saved if one holds certain beliefs about Christ as personal Lord and Savior, or, in the conservative Roman Catholic version recently asserted by Benedict XVI, if one participates in a specific way in the
sacramental life of the Catholic Church. There can be no doubt that a high percentage of the approximately 217 million adult American Christians hold exclusionist views, which are commonplace among evangelical and funda-mentalist Christians (comprising 38 percent of the total American population),
as well as among conservative Catholics. It would be folly to ignore this right-wing Christian movement, which is political, and religious life.Religious exclusionism has many benefits to offer people. Exclusionist a potent force in American cultural,
churches of true believers integrate basic, social, natural, and reflective goods into a quest for what they consider to be the highest good, defined as salvation. What is this salvation? In its extreme forms, Christian exclusionists understand salvation as redemption from a world drenched in sin, decadence, personal
and chaos. Salvation is the promise of bodily assumption into heaven. This view exemplifies “hypertheism” in religion. Hypertheism surrenders human freedom of moral and theological reflection in service to adecrees that are beyond criticism. It contradicts the good of bsolute truths, divine spiritual integrity,
namely, a dedication to the proper relation asued or integrated when one seeks redemption the world, because that quest violates the integrity of life as life life. Human basic, social, natural, and reflective goods cannot be rightly pur-mong goods in the integrity of from this world rather than in the world.for
ism in the United States is a particular form of traditional, Bible-based Christianity. Fundamentalism in particular constitutes a subgroup under the larger umbrella of evangelical Christianity. All fundamentalists are evangeli-Consider now an extreme form of Christian exclusionism. Fundamental-
cals, although not all evangelicals are fundamentalists. Indeed, not all Evangelical Christians are exclusionists. Fundamentalism represents a loose confederation of churches and individuals without a central institution or