Perspectives on Pastoral Care

The Pastor and the Religious Fanatic

by David Voss

“A fanatic,” says Nicolai Berdyaev, “is a person who can only think of one thing at a time.” The Russian theologian, who calls fanaticism a “painful distortion of conscience,” puts his finger on a central weakness in this person whom all pastors know, some pastors admire, and many pastors dread.

Fanaticism is always religious, at least in the sense that the fanatic always elevates something or someone to the level of absolute. The very word comes from the Latin word for (fanum) and was first used to denote an enthusiastic prophet. So what, we need to ask ourselves, is eating the religious fanatic? And what can we do with him or for her?

Berdayaev points towards an understanding. A fanatic is a person grasping for simple answers to complex questions. Out of idealism or frustration or narrowed vision the fanatic stakes her life—and even the lives of others—on her special set of absolutes. A fanatic is a human being like the rest of us who is trying to make his way in the world by reducing to manageable proportions the wonderful and bewildering complexity of that world. All of us would like a glimpse of divine wisdom, a sense of divine presence, a share in divine power. In our limited knowledge and terrifying aloneness, and humbling frailty, such wisdom and presence and power is something for which we are hungry. So we grasp at a holy book, defend our holy places, and claim for our movement a holy destiny. And those who claim another book, another place, another destiny? They become the enemy, the outsider, the infidel. Not only because they do not share our vision, but because their very claim threatens the absolute validity of ours.

All of us have known fanatics. We have probably envied them for their certainty. We have felt the pull within ourselves to wipe out complexity and ambivalence with a wave of our chosen banner. What can a pastor do in the face of this understandable but frightening response to such a deep human need? Four suggestions.

	Because the fanatic has often experienced frustration or even what he may think of as failure in some sphere of his life, it is helpful to encourage him in the direction of some creative act—as simple as planting a garden or as challenging as learning to play a musical instrument. Eric Hoffer has observed that extreme poverty does not seem to lead to fanaticism for those who are constantly renewing their sense of worth through creative work. “Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves,” he writes, “as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out.”
	Second, as the fanatic begins to discover the value of creativity for herself, encourage her to grant that same freedom to others. Berdyaev makes an eloquent plea for a tolerance which is rooted in the “tolerance of God for human freedom, even the freedom to do evil.” Respect for another’s freedom to think and act differently from what I desire is another name for tolerance. Call it the willingness to live with the ambiguity that goes with human freedom.
	Third, since the religious fanatic is constantly searching for absolutes, try to point him gently in the direction of guiding principles rather than absolute practices, rituals, or even beliefs. Gandhi and martin Luther King, two men who might have been called fanatics, managed to temper their vision and harness into creative paths the explosive energies of their followers by adhering to a single principle—the principle of non-violence. Honoring such a guiding principle can help tame and channel the fanatic spirit.
	Finally, though, the pastor’s greatest hope is to help the person gripped by fanaticism to experience for himself the only absolute, the One alone who is God. Not ideas about God or particular rituals or practices of those who seek God, but God only. At the heart of that experience of the Absolute all names and rules and books and places become clearly something less than absolute. To encourage persons toward the experience of God is the pastor’s ultimate goal.