ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF VIOLENT

CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM:
FIGHTING TO MATTER ULTIMATELY

Matthias Beier

On June 17, 1994, Paul Hill, a Christian anti-abortion extremist

and former minister, was heard shouting “Mommy, mommy,
don’t kill me” and “God hates murders and murderers” outside
The Ladies Center abortion clinic, Pensacola, Florida (Ladies
Center, 2003). Six weeks later, on July 29, 1994, Hill killed Dr.
John Britton, 69, and his volunteer clinic escort, James Barrett,
74, with a barrage of bullets, in the driveway of the clinic, since
renamed Community Healthcare Center. The reason: Hill be-
lieved he had to take “all godly action necessary to defend inno-
cent human life including the use of force” (Army of God, 1993).
Hill, the first person in the United States executed, in 2003,
for the killing of an abortion provider, became an icon for vio-
lent Christian fundamentalists bent on “restoring” the United
States to a theocratic rule under God’s law (Clarkson, 1997). For
the mainstream Christian pro-life movement, which condemned
his act, he became an embarrassment. Contrary to his grandiose
expectations, his violent act of what he called “justifiable homi-
cide” backfired, weakening the public standing of the movement.
Since 1993, when violent Christian anti-abortion activists began
to target the life of abortion providers, seven people have been
killed and fifteen injured in six separate shootings and two bomb-
ings. Most of the killings and many of the more than 200 arsons
and bombings of abortion providers were committed by people
who, like Hill, were associated with the “Army of God” (AOG),
an organization of “soldiers” of God (Pinkerson, Levin, & Voll,
2001) vowing to end legalized abortion by any means necessary
(Clarkson, 1998). Active since 1982, it is led by Rev. Michael
Psychoanalytic Review, 93(2), April 2006  2006 N.P.A.P.
302 MATTHIAS BEIER

Bray, a Reformation Lutheran pastor, and author of A Time To

Kill (Bray, 1994), which advocates the murder of abortion clinic
personnel (Beirich & Potok, 2003). AOG provides the ideologi-
cal base for “justifiable homicide.” Its manual says AOG “is a
real Army, and God is the General and Commander-in-Chief”
(National Abortion Federation, 2005).
This paper proceeds in three steps. I first delineate violent
Christian fundamentalism within the context of religion, then
develop a psychoanalytic perspective on the function of the iden-
tification with God in fundamentalist Christian violence, and fi-
nally present the case of anti-abortion killer Paul Hill to exem-
plify the psychoanalytic model.

VIOLENT CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM IN CONTEXT

Violent Christian fundamentalism is a phenomenon of religion.

Religion by nature deals with “ultimate concerns” (Tillich, 1957).
A psychoanalytic study of the use of God language to justify acts
of absolute annihilation has to take such ultimate concerns seri-
ously. Freud (1930) came close to the question of ultimate con-
cerns when he asked what the “purpose [Zweck] of life” is (p.
76). In characteristic utilitarian fashion he answered himself that
humans “strive after happiness.” What Freud did not ask was the
existential question of the meaning [Sinn] of life. This ultimate
question is the primary domain of religion. Religion deals with
the fundamental question of the value of one’s existence per se.
Hence “religious ideas” are “perhaps the most important item
in the psychical inventory of a civilization” (Freud, 1927, p. 14).
It addresses questions of being, whether “I” have worth because
“I” exist, rather than of doing, whether “I” have worth for behav-
ing in certain ways. In fact, religion often gives assurance that
one matters despite “unworthy” actions. Do “I” matter ultimately
in the universe, despite “my” inevitable finitude, even a million
years from now? Do “I” matter not just relative to others, but
simply for “me” existing? In clinical practice I have encountered
these questions, for example, when a patient feels worthless
apart from the mother, or feels rejected for who he is by his
father, or feels her life has been one big failure. Psychoanalyti-
cally, such questions relate to narcissistic dynamics, especially to
VIOLENT CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM 303

Freud’s (1914) notion of primary and secondary narcissism. Vio-

lent Christian fundamentalism is a militant attempt to assure
oneself that one matters ultimately.
What differentiates violent Christian fundamentalism from
other, related forms of religion? In his classic book on Christian
fundamentalism and evangelicalism, Mardsen (1991) coined the
well-known definition of a fundamentalist as “an evangelical who
is angry about something” (p. 1). We could say in turn that a
violent Christian fundamentalist is a fundamentalist who is en-
raged about something. About what? I will try to show in this
paper that he—most are male—is enraged at a fundamental sense
of having his right to exist questioned.
The term “fundamentalism” was coined in 1920 by Curtis
Lee Laws, editor of the Northern Baptist periodical The Watch-
man Examiner, and became the self-description of evangelical
Protestants willing to “do battle royal” for what they saw as “the
fundamentals” of the Christian faith (Mardsen, 1991, p. 57). To-
day, fundamentalism more often than not is used to refer to
Muslim fundamentalists. Unless otherwise indicated, I will use
the term to refer to mainly Protestant Christian fundamentalists.
Fundamentalists emerged when “orthodox people began to or-
ganize for survival in a world dominated by the non-orthodox”
(Ammermann, 1991, p. 4). From the beginning, fundamentalism
has thus been fueled by a fight for existence against forces per-
ceived to threaten it. The fight for survival gives the movement
its militant character. Not surprisingly, the most prominent ideo-
logical issues in Christian fundamentalism deal precisely with the
basic question of existence: abortion, the question of creation-
ism versus evolution, and the “end of the world.”
Christian fundamentalists share many beliefs with other
Christian conservatives, but distinguish themselves by insisting
“that there can be tests of faith” (Ammermann, 1991, p. 8). They
share “traditional” interpretations of the virgin birth of Jesus, of
his miracles, of his bodily resurrection from the dead, and of his
eventual return to rule the earth (p. 2). Although fundamental-
ists are found in nearly all Protestant denominations, most come
from the evangelical branch of conservative Christianity (p. 2).
Fundamentalists share with other evangelicals the beliefs that hu-
mans need salvation from sin, that such salvation can be ob-
304 MATTHIAS BEIER

tained only through a personal decision to accept Jesus as Sav-

ior, often referred to as being “born again,” that the Bible is
inerrant in all its content, and that Christians are charged to
actively evangelize others to win them for Christ (pp. 2–3). Up
to the 1940s “fundamentalist” was interchangeable with “evan-
gelical.” In the 1950s and 1960s a rift occurred when fundamen-
talists broke with evangelical Billy Graham after he had invited
mainstream denominations to his crusades. Fundamentalists dif-
fer from other evangelicals through their separation from those
they consider lukewarm believers (p. 37). They claim to be the
true believers. They typically “belong to a church with strict rules
for its own membership and for its cooperative relations with
others” (p. 8). They make absolute truth claims and despise the
idea of relativism.
In addition to the belief that faith can be tested and that
they must be pure and uncompromising, fundamentalists distin-
guish themselves from other conservative Christians and evan-
gelicals by emphasizing the near apocalyptic end of the world
(Ammermann, 1991, pp. 6–7). (1991) Strozier argues that apoca-
lyptic belief, which he calls “endism,” is “the ground of funda-
mentalist being” (p. 11). Psychologically, endism expresses the
fundamentalist’s preoccupation with a fear of death and fini-
tude, while “rebirth” is the antidote to it. “The reborn self that
fundamentalists proclaim grounds their existence” (p. 86) and
“brings salvation from death” (p. 87). The fundamentalist’s key
battle aims to defeat death in form of ultimate insignificance
(“hell”). This paper focuses mainly on how fundamentalist vio-
lence attempts to rid oneself of the continuing threat “the
world” poses to “end” the precarious sense of one’s significance.
In “the world,” fundamentalist Christians fight, then as now,
militantly in two areas of “the larger culture: politics and views
of science” (Mardsen, 1991, p. viii). The major political battle
aims at protecting the “traditional family,” which means “a le-
gally married man and woman, with their children, preferably
supported solely by the husband’s labor” (Ammermann, 1991,
p. 45). The “most acute” concern in this battle is “the issue of
abortion” (p. 45), which has led to some of the greatest peaceful
mobilizations by fundamentalists as well as to the use of lethal
force in the name of the Christian God. Other issues related to
VIOLENT CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM 305

the preservation of the “traditional family” center around oppo-

sition to gay rights, to full equality of men and women, and to
divorce. In the area of science the fight aims at the notion of
evolution which relativizes the special nature of humans. Crea-
tionism, once defeated in the 1925 Scopes Trial, is gaining new
momentum in the United States. An August 2005 poll found
that nearly two thirds of Americans, 64 percent, want both crea-
tionism and evolution taught in schools, while 38 percent of all
respondents wanted only creationism taught (Goodstein, 2005).
Psychologically, the fight against abortion and the fight against
evolution converge in one important point: both aim to defend
God as the absolute Creator and humans as created in God’s
likeness. Violent abortion activists see themselves as helping God
be the Creator. Neal Horsley, creator of the federally shut down
Nuremberg Files Web site, which listed “Wanted” posters with
home addresses of abortion doctors, writes in The Abortion Aboli-
tionist that the “defining attribute of God” is that “God is their
[believers’] personal Creator who was the active agent in their
conception and birth. . . . Legalized abortion attacks God in His
unique role as The Creator,” because it overrules “God’s deci-
sion” to create “a human being made in the image of The Cre-
ator” (Horsley, 2004b). Horsley created the “Creator’s Rights
Party” to fight abortion (Horsley, 2004a). The connection be-
tween humans as created in the image of God and the duty to
defend the Creator through identification with “Him” is com-
mon in anti-abortion rhetoric (cf. Operation Rescue West, 2005;
Operation Save America, 2004; Terry, 1988).
While the vast majority of fundamentalists, such as the Fam-
ily Research Council and Focus on the Family, try to change the
world nonviolently within existing democratic structures—through
picketing, voter registrations, lobbying at the White House, or
national mobilization events, for example, the two 2005 “Justice
Sundays.” aimed at eventually overturning Roe v. Wade—a small
minority of fundamentalists endorse or use violent means to
fight in the moral arena for what they regard as fundamentals
of belief. A key difference between violent Christian fundamen-
talists and nonviolent fundamentalists is their view of obedience
to government. While both groups consider abortion murder,
the latter group tries to change the laws and officers of the land
306 MATTHIAS BEIER

within the current government structure, believing with Romans

13:1–2 that God ordains governments and requires Christians
to obey them. The Southern Baptist Convention (1994) used this
passage in their 1994 Statement of Conscience to condemn
Hill’s killings (Hill, 2003). Violent fundamentalists, on the other
hand, argue that obedience to the government is no longer re-
quired if it prevents the “murder” of the innocent, comparing
anti-abortion violence to the kind of violent civil disobedience
that was required in Nazi Germany (Hill, 2003).
Since most violent Christian fundamentalists were once as-
sociated with nonviolent militant fundamentalist groups, much
overlap exists. For instance, many who signed the “defensive ac-
tion statement” (Army of God, 1993) distributed by Paul Hill,
which defended the first homicide of an abortion doctor, Mi-
chael Griffin’s killing of Dr. David Gunn in 1993, as justifiable,
“had previously been prominent in Operation Rescue, the group
founded and long headed by Randall Terry” (Clarkson, 1998).
James Kopp, too, who killed Dr. Barnett Slepian in 1998, had
once worked with Terry (Zremski, 2002). The very notion of
“justifiable homicide” was developed by Michael Hirsh as his
“thesis paper” at Pat Robertson’s Regent University (Clarkson,
2003). Hirsh once worked for Pat Robertson and later became
Hill’s lawyer. Clayton Lee Waagner, behind bars for sending
fake anthrax letters to abortion clinics following 9/11 and post-
ing a threat on the AOG Web site in 2001 vowing to “kill as
many” abortion providers “as I can,” for “I am anointed and
called to be God’s Warrior. . . . I am protected by THE MOST
HIGH GOD” (Waagner, 2001; capitals in original), had his born-
again experience in 1975 at Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting
Network (CBN) and once worked for CBN’s 700 Club religious
talk show (Jacoby, 2002). In addition, there is overlap in the vio-
lent rhetoric that both nonviolent and violent fundamentalists
use, such as “war” or “battle” to describe what they are engaged
in (cf. Terry, 1988) and “murder,” “enemy,” or “homicide” to
describe what they are fighting against.
What distinguishes psychologically nonviolent from violent
Christian fundamentalists? A few preliminary observations can
be made before studying this question in depth. First, the differ-
ence lies not so much in ideology but in the means justified to
implement that ideology. Violent fundamentalists believe that
VIOLENT CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM 307

stopping abortion would justify any “means necessary” (Hill, 2003).

Second, the notion that “one must obey God more than people”
(Acts 5:29) has been radicalized in violent fundamentalism to
mean that those opposed to the will of God as perceived by the
violent fundamentalist are dispensable (cf. Hill, 2003). Third, in-
herent absolute truth claims make Christian fundamentalism
conducive for battling in the name of God with “absolute”
means. In my book A Violent God-Image (Beier, 2004), I have
shown that a latent violent God-image pervades traditional inter-
pretations of key Christian notions of sin and the cross, held also
by fundamentalists. Last but not least, many of the violent anti-
abortion activists I studied either had contentious relationships
with or absence of their fathers, or felt deprived of becoming
fathers due to an abortion. Paul Hill’s father, an airline pilot,
was frequently absent. Neal Horsley, perhaps today’s best known
anti-abortion extremist, “never knew his father . . . who died
some four months before his son was born.” The father report-
edly “spoke to his unborn son from his deathbed” (Southern
Poverty Law Center [SPL], 2002). Horsley, who calls women who
have abortions “homicidal mothers” (Southern Poverty Law
Center, 2002), said he was in “a state of perpetual confusion as
a kid” from which the absolute claims of Christian fundamental-
ism offered relief. Clay Waagner was abandoned by his father at
age two and rejected by him again with the question “What do
you want here?” when he visited the father for the first and last
time thirty years later (Jacoby, 2002). James Kopp decided on
killing for the anti-abortion cause after he learned that his girl-
friend aborted what could have become his child (National
Abortion Federation, 2005). Paul deParrie, an AOG associate,
whose father was shot when his mother was about two months
pregnant with him, dates the beginning of his existence to the
moment his father was killed. “I say ‘existence’ because the death
became that turning point before I was born” (deParrie, 2004).
The list could go on.

TOWARD A PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY OF VIOLENT

CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM
The primary question of this paper is what happens psychologi-
cally when violent Christian fundamentalists kill in the name of
God. Why do they do so “in the name of God,” the ultimate
308 MATTHIAS BEIER

“omnipotent selfobject” (Kohut, 1978, p. 619)? The first thing

we can assume when God is invoked for killing is that something
of ultimate significance is at stake for the ego of the killer, some-
thing “fundamental” to the existence of the ego. I propose that
this “fundamental” is nothing less than whether the existence of
one’s ego is experienced as ultimately significant or not. During
the online symposium “Psychology of Religious Fundamentalism
II” (2005) participants agreed that shame and humiliation are
central in the emergence of religious violence. Ana-Maria Rizzuto
urged psychoanalysts studying violent fundamentalism to pay at-
tention to the “narcissistic humiliation and the compensatory
need to identify with very powerful objects and omnipotent di-
vinities to provide the self and the group with a measure of nar-
cissistic reprieval” (Psychology of Religious Fundamentalism II,
2005). While all religions try to counter the ultimate “narcissistic
humiliation,” which Freud (1927) called “the cruelty of Fate, par-
ticularly as it is shown in death” (p. 18), a person who kills in the
name of God is defending in a very particular way against this
ultimate humiliation.
An answer to the question how narcissistic humiliation leads
to a violent compensatory identification with the idealized “om-
nipotent selfobject” requires that “the psychoanalytic and the ex-
istential meet” (Stein, 2004, p. 26). I turn both to psychoanalytic
and existential psychoanalytic theory to understand the genesis
of the idea of “God the Father” in its function for the ego. While
Freud is known for tracing religion to a longing for the father
based on identification with him during the oedipal period, his
idea of the ego-ideal points to earlier roots of religion in primary
and secondary narcissism. Psychoanalytic perspectives on reli-
gion after Freud have sought the roots of religion more in the
preoedipal period (cf. Eigen, 1986; Erikson, 1966, 1977; Kohut,
1978; Rizzuto, 1979).
Freud (1927, 1930) connected the genesis of the idea of
God and of religion in general with the birth of the superego
and its early precursor, the ego ideal. He saw the idea of God
derived partly from human helplessness and the need for protec-
tion from a force greater than ourselves. The idea of God was
meant to protect humans in the face of three major forces
threatening individual existence: the terrors of nature, the cru-
VIOLENT CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM 309

elty of fate in the form of one’s death, and the privations im-
posed by civilized life (Freud, 1927, p. 18). Freud (1913, 1927,
1930) paid attention mostly to the way the oedipal idea of God
functions as compensation for (sexual) “privations imposed by
civilized life.” Perhaps it was his own discomfort with the idea of
death (Gay, 1988, p. 58) that kept him from more fully exploring
how fear of death is involved in the emergence of the idea of
God. His theory of primary and secondary narcissism, with its
notion of the infant’s experience of omnipotence and helpless-
ness at the earliest, preoedipal stage of life can lead us further.
According to Freud, in the transition from primary to secondary
narcissism, the child, for the first time, assigns omnipotence to
the ideal it created of itself when recognizing the need for the
other in order to exist. Examining the concept of “the ego ideal”
will clarify the indentificatory processes involved in the birth of
fundamentalist violence in the name of God. While it would be
easy to recast the dynamics Freud (1914) describes as idealiza-
tion in the sphere of “ego-libido” and of “object-libido” (p. 94)
in terms of Kohut’s (1978) differentiation between the “grandi-
ose self” and the idealized “omnipotent selfobject” (p. 619–620),
in this paper I will have to confine myself to Freud’s key texts
on the origin of the ego ideal in light of the narcissistic satisfac-
tion the ego derives from it. An appreciation of Freud’s ideas on
narcissism does not require an adoption of the drive model. As
Winnicott (1969) put it, what “caused us to invent the term ca-
thexis” was the fact that “the object has become meaningful” (p.
88).
In his 1914 paper On Narcissism, Freud postulates that there
once was a psychic state in each individual not yet corrupted by
the “cruelty of fate” or “death.” He argues for “a primary narcis-
sism in everyone” (p. 88), an “original libidinal cathexis of the
ego” (p. 75) which brings with it “the primitive feeling of omnipo-
tence” (p. 98) and a sense of “the immortality of the ego” (p. 91,
emphasis added). In this “original narcissism . . . the childish ego
enjoyed self-sufficiency” (Freud, 1921, pp. 109–10). The experi-
ence of self-sufficient omnipotence comes to a sudden end when
the infant experiences helplessness as it realizes that it cannot
survive on its own. This first experience of finitude in form of
helplessness coincides with the first recognition of “the nonself,
310 MATTHIAS BEIER

the object” beyond self-sufficient primary narcissistic unity (Chas-

seguet-Smirgel, 1976, p. 347). This “seems to be the determining
moment when his narcissistic omnipotence, now denied, is pro-
jected onto the object—the child’s first ego ideal” (p. 348). The
fall out of narcissistic self-sufficiency results in a “gap left in his
ego” (p. 348; cf. Beier, 2004).
For Freud, the aim of the formation of the original ego ideal
is fundamentally narcissistic. It is a defensive maneuver in which
the psyche of the infant tries to retain narcissistic omnipotence
by using the psychic representation of the recognized “nonself”
to create an ideal version of the ego. What the child “projects
before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of
his childhood in which he was his own ideal” (Freud, 1914, p.
94). In other words, in an attempt to disavow the reality of the
nonself that disrupted primary narcissism, the ego turns the per-
ceived nonself into part of itself to create secondary narcissism.
This is where “God the Father” is first born. In response to the
disruption of primary narcissism, the infant turns the perceived
“father” into the omnipotent part of itself in order to restore its
self-sufficient narcissistic existence. At the same time, this pro-
cess disavows and in that sense psychically “kills” the father both
as an object that the ego relates to intrapsychically through “ob-
ject-cathexis” and as a “real object” outside of the subject’s mind
(Winnicott, 1969, p. 94).
The nature of Freud’s “ego ideal” has similarity to Kohut’s
(1978) notion of the “idealized selfobject” (p. 619) and, to some
degree, also to Winnicott’s (1969) notion of “object-relating” (p.
88). Freud (1923) describes the intrapsychic, narcissistic use of
the “object” in The Ego and the Id (p. 31) as a form of “immediate
identification.” Behind “the origin of the ego ideal” lies “hidden
an individual’s first and most important identification, his identi-
fication with the father in his own personal prehistory.” Freud
adds that this is “a direct and immediate identification and takes
place earlier than any object-cathexis.” While a footnote explains
that he should say “parents,” for our study of the function of
“God the Father” in mostly male, violent Christian fundamental-
ists, the primary identification with the father is of particular
interest.
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud (1921)
VIOLENT CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM 311

wrote that “the distinction between an identification with the

father and the choice of the father as an object” is that in “the first
case one’s father is what one would like to be, and in the second
he is what one would like to have. The distinction, that is, de-
pends upon whether the tie attaches to the subject or to the
object of the ego” (p. 106). In violent Christian fundamentalism,
the tie to the father attaches to the subject of the ego: The ego
identifies with the omnipotent father, God the Father, in an ef-
fort to be him and “to become one’s own father (and creator)” (Drew-
ermann, 1986, p. 406, emphasis added; cf. Beier, 2004, pp. 104–
106). Freud (1910) himself pointed out that behind a man’s wish
to be God lies ultimately “the wish to be the father of himself,”
expressed when a man “identifies himself completely with the
father” (p. 171). The son wants to create himself, exist “causa
sui,” be the ground of his own existence (cf. Becker, 1973, p.
36), which is an attempt to recover the original state of primary
narcissism undisrupted by any nonself or object. Intrapsychi-
cally, the son then unconsciously believes that “he corresponds
to his own ego ideal” (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1985, p. 31). The
project of recovering self-sufficient narcissistic bliss requires the
absolute destruction of “the object(s)” perceived to be in the way
of attaining primary omnipotence. Violence in the name of God the
Father ultimately aims at the eradication of the nonself which by its
mere existence questions the ego’s omnipotence. Behind absolute hate
is the feeling that we are justified to exist only if we are God. As
Eigen (1986) aptly put it, “When we hate we think we are or
ought to be God” (p. 211).
When the child later makes identifications based on object-
cathexis, those identifications “reinforce the primary one” (Freud,
1923, p. 31). During the oedipal period of the boy, the father’s
image and rules are again internalized into the already existing
ego ideal, but now with characteristic ambivalence due to the
“wish to get rid of his father in order to take his place with his
mother” (p. 32). Chasseguet-Smirgel (1976) hence speaks of dif-
ferent “pregenital ego ideals” which are integrated eventually
with the “Oedipal ego ideal.” “The genital, Oedipal ego ideal
contains all of the pregenital ego ideals” (p. 351). While I agree
with Chasseguet-Smirgel on the difference between preoedipal
and oedipal ego ideal, I disagree with the idea that we can neatly
312 MATTHIAS BEIER

separate the superego from the ego ideal. For Freud (1933), the
self-observing superego is “the vehicle [Träger, “the carrier”] of
the ego ideal by which the ego measures itself” (p. 65; cf. 1914,
p. 95; 1916–1917, p. 429). By measuring the ego by the ego
ideal, the “special psychical agency” Freud (1914) later called the
“superego” tries to ensure “narcissistic satisfaction from the ego
ideal” (p. 95). In Nazi Germany or violent Christian fundamen-
talism we do not see a destruction of the superego but rather a
regression of the superego to the narcissistic level. The oedipal ego
ideal becomes disavowed when the ego’s very existence and sig-
nificance feels at stake.
Applied to the identification of the violent Christian funda-
mentalist with God the Father, this means that the believer here
does not primarily want to be the father in the oedipal, triadic
sense, in order to possess the mother. Instead, the relationship
to the father is one of narcissistic identification rather than of
object choice, as a dyadic model of primary and secondary nar-
cissism suggests: The son wants to be the father in order to be his own
Creator. The violent Christian fundamentalist who vows to kill or
does kill abortion doctors projectively wants to kill the father
whose mere existence or (in some of the cases mentioned ear-
lier) absence is experienced as a threat to the existence of the
ego, that is, “the unborn” life of the son’s ego apart from the
father. Wanting to be one’s own father by identifying with God
corresponds intrapsychically to the ego’s attempt to be the ego ideal
in an effort to return to the omnipotent state of primary narcis-
sism. The virtual reduction of the role of the mother to a baby-
machine (Atwood, 1985) under the control of men rather than
as a love object is a consequence of this narcissistic identification
of the ego with the ego ideal. The regression described here oc-
curs when the ego’s existence feels ultimately threatened, an ex-
perience that can be evoked by any instance of narcissistic humil-
iation. The ego then disavows the oedipal father, whose existence
as a “real object” in Winnicott’s sense is seen as the ultimate
threat to the ego’s self-sufficient existence. The thought of abor-
tion, and even contraception, is such taboo in patriarchical fun-
damentalism because it would destroy the omnipotence of men
as fathers. Calling women who abort “accessories to murder”
(Hill) or “homicidal mothers” (Horsley) points psychologically to
VIOLENT CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM 313

the violent fundamentalist’s self-sufficient, narcissistic wish not

only to be the father of himself but also to be completely inde-
pendent in one’s own creation from the mother as well.
Existentially, the psychological attempt to close the gap
within the ego is an attempt to overcome the experience of hu-
man helplessness in form of finitude. It is a project at conquer-
ing “ontological insecurity” (Laing, 1965, pp. 39–61). Argumen-
tative claims to absolute truth then serve the function “to preserve
my existence” (p. 43). Any suggestion of being wrong in an argu-
ment raises the feeling of “being wrong” as an existence. Being
the ground of oneself is psychologically equivalent to not being
derived from one’s parents. The Christian notion that humans
are “created in the image of God,” itself an affirmative symbol
for the ultimate significance of all human life, then receives the
psychological function of violently disavowing the origin of one’s
existence from one’s parents. The intrapsychic relation to “God”
replaces the real relationship with parents. “Creationism” uncon-
sciously counters the emphasis on the family as the highest value
in fundamentalism: “creationism” provides to the fundamental-
ist the only freedom from the bosom of the family. In the case
of a Christian anti-abortion killer, emphasis on creationism func-
tions psychologically as an identification with God: The killer iden-
tifies with God and practically attempts to be the creator of him-
self against all outside influences that threaten the self-sufficient
existence. God becomes identified with the ego.
We now can distinguish psychoanalytically more clearly be-
tween nonviolent and violent Christian fundamentalism. In non-
violent Christian fundamentalism the narcissistic longing for a
return to the “fundamentals” of a self-sufficient existence is kept
in check by adherence to the oedipal ego ideal, heir of the “real”
object relationship with the father. This finds symbolic expres-
sion in nonviolent fundamentalism in the strict obedience to the
divinely ordained government as required in Romans 13:1–2. In
violent Christian fundamentalism, on the other hand, the oedi-
pal ego ideal has been disavowed in relation to those upon which
the narcissistic threat has been projected, such as the “abortion-
ist” in the case of anti-abortion fundamentalism. At the same
time, the superego regresses to earlier narcissistic versions of the
314 MATTHIAS BEIER

ego ideal with which the ego now identifies in order to become,
in omnipotent fashion, God the Father, “the Creator.”
The existential aspect involved in Christian fundamentalist
violence relates to the important self-reflective dynamic given
with the creation of the ego ideal. Laing (1965, p. 116) percep-
tively pointed to a footnote in Freud’s description of the fort-da
game (Freud, 1920, pp. 14–15) in which the “child had found a
method of making himself disappear” by looking into a mirror
and then crouching down to make “his mirror-image ‘gone.’”
Laing (1965) comments that “in overcoming or attempting to
overcome the loss or absence of the real other in whose eyes he
[i.e., the child] lived and moved and had his being, he becomes
another person to himself who could look at him from the mirror” (p.
117, emphasis added), but who could also make himself disap-
pear. This is Narcissus seeing himself reflected in the pool, but
not just in a simple reflection. In the very eyes of his mirror-
image he sees another reflection of himself, which in turn re-
flects in its eye another image of himself, and so on ad infinitum.
Secondary narcissism evokes a self-reflective aspect of the ego
that has the ability to infinitize. It is this infinitizing dimension
created in self-reflectiveness which first creates the psychological
and philosophical condition for three related phenomena: the
experience of oneself as omnipotent, the experience of despair
in the face of death, and the emergence of the idea of God. The
ego seeing itself is the self, while the self that recognizes itself
infinitely reflected is what religions tend to call the spirit. The
infinitizing capacity of the human spirit can be the psychological
medium through which humans may experience ultimate signifi-
cance, or it can endow human violence with the kind of absolute
character we see in religiously motivated violence. It is this infini-
tizing capacity of the human spirit that first endows the psycho-
dynamics of drive, object, ego or self with their absolute or ulti-
mate character (Drewermann, 1986, p. 221; cf. Beier, 2004, pp.
99–100). Any “idealized object” in the psyche, including the ego-
ideal or God, has received its “absolute” or “perfect” character
through the ego’s self-reflective, infinitizing capacity. In the abor-
tion debate, the infinitizing capacity turns embryonic stem cells
via the imagination into a human child.
Narcissistic injury is so infuriating because it evokes an ex-
VIOLENT CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM 315

perience of existential insignificance. The self-reflective capacity

turns lethal when the human spirit, under the impression of ex-
periences of narcissistic humiliation in relation to others, raises
the ego’s fear to absolute levels as it infinitely reflects the aware-
ness of one’s own inevitable death or finitude, one’s ultimate
“helplessness.” Under the impression of that fear, the spirit cre-
ates a sense of infinite finitude: The self-reflective self feels for-
ever trapped in finitude, in the knowledge of its inevitable death.
“Death” then equals ultimate insignificance. Kierkegaard (1849)
coined the term “sickness unto death,” from which springs onto-
logical insecurity and the desire to counter the sense of ultimate
despair. The violent anti-abortion fundamentalist’s obsession
with being “born again” and with protecting “unborn” life by all
means necessary is a projection of the desire to protect the ego
from the threat of ultimate insignificance, from being trapped
in a finite body (the “homicidal mother”) before one could ever
matter (“be born”).
From the experience of absolute fear stirred by one’s self-
reflective awareness of infinite finitude, the desire for the abso-
lute is born, which expresses itself in the human spirit’s desire
for absolute recognition. Existentially speaking, this is the birth-
place of religion and of a sense of the sacred: One wants to be
recognized as absolutely significant, as sacred. This existential de-
sire to be ultimately significant can and often has been addressed
positively by religion: Martin Luther King’s message “You are
somebody” is just one example. The God-image of primary or
secondary narcissism does not pose a problem as long as it is
not identified with something or somebody finite. It turns
deadly when a short-circuiting of the infinite and the finite oc-
curs, as happens, for instance, when a cult leader is deified or
when the finite ego is said to be the ego ideal. As can be wit-
nessed in the current global terror conflict, the characteristic
“deification” of the “finite” historical process in fundamental-
isms across the globe (Mardsen, 1991, pp. 33–35)—which turns
culturally variable, “finite” ethical norms into absolute truth
claims—poses a grave danger to the global community today. In
the case I now present, the self has been identified with the God-
image in an effort to attain absolute significance. Confusion of
the finite with the infinite serves the “denial of death” (Becker,
316 MATTHIAS BEIER

1973) and occurs when the self-reflective spirit gets caught up

and stuck in dynamics of absolute fear. The God-image then be-
comes ambivalent and turns into the primary source of absolute
fear (Beier, 2004, p. 39). “The Other” becomes an ultimate threat
to the self and “the experience of oneself as a person under the
loving eye of the mother” or father, so essential for “the develop-
ment of the self,” becomes impossible (Laing, 1965, p. 116).
A key question for the human spirit is whether the ego feels
it matters ultimately in light of its predictable, inevitable death.
The Christian fundamentalist who turns violent tries to defend
the significance of his own existence, this most fundamental of
fundamentals, against his experience of finitude by identifying
the ego with the ego ideal. This represents his attempt to recover
the state of primary narcissism and requires him to kill off those
upon whom he has projected the most basic threat to his self-
sufficient, womb-like existence: abortion providers, in the case
of anti-abortion violence.

ANTI-ABORTION VIOLENCE IN THE NAME OF GOD

THE FATHER: THE CASE OF PAUL HILL

“God is life, and has created human life to reflect Him in a

unique manner. Since those at war with God cannot harm Him
physically, they often vent their murderous fury on those made
in His image, including the unborn. To deny the duty to defend
these helpless children is an affront to the One in whose image
they are made” (Hill, 2003). In this religious defense of radical
anti-abortion activism, Paul Hill emphasized that “the unborn”
are made in the image of God, the Creator. Hill’s two statements
cited at the beginning of this article express two related basic
identifications behind his remorseless killings. In “Mommy,
mommy, please don’t kill me!” we hear Hill as one identified
with the “unborn baby.” In the statement “God hates murder
and murderers” we hear Hill identified with a “God” who is “jus-
tified” to kill those involved in “killing” the “unborn.” To the
very last day of his life as a self-made martyr he expressed both
identifications: “May God help you to protect the unborn as you
would want to be protected” (Pinkham & Davis, 2003).
Who was Paul Hill? He was notorious for his constant smile
VIOLENT CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM 317

or grin. Many found it “unnerving” and were “infuriated” be-

cause it smacked of “self-satisfaction and condescension.” Hill’s
supporters say it was a sign of “spiritual peace.” A member of
the first congregation Hill pastored, Richard Frierson, experi-
enced it as distancing. “I reckon a polite way to put it would be
that he was a kind of a private person. You really never knew
what he was thinking—what was going on in his mind. He always
had that perpetual grin on his face” (Norman, 2003). Hill’s con-
stant smile appeared with his sudden conversion at age seven-
teen, after which he “tried to be the model Christian” (Sawyer,
1994). The statements of those who knew Hill suggest that his
smile defended him from real contact while making him appear
impeccable. Its infuriating quality stemmed from its apparent
message that “you cannot threaten me and do not matter to me
for I am self-sufficient.” Hill maintained the smile to the day of
his execution, on which he expected to receive “glory” (Tinning,
2003) and a “great reward” from God (Siemaszko, 2003). John
Leonard, Hill’s college roommate from Belhaven College in
Jackson, Mississippi, knew him as one who has “never been
wrong about anything. . . . I’ve never won an argument on any
topic with him. . . . He cannot live with any conflict” (Hooten,
1999). Rev. Michael Schneider, Hill’s pastoral mentor from the
time he studied at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson,
said, “He was so intense, he couldn‘t live with people who didn‘t
agree with him” (Norman, 2003). Constant arguments with
members of the three small churches from the Presbyterian
Church of America and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church Hill,
pastored from 1984 to 1990 in South Carolina and Florida, even-
tually led him to leave what he called his “unfruitful ministry”
(Hill, 2003). Any of Hill’s arguments had the quality of a fight
for his very existence. Being wrong would have meant being
nonexistent. His experience was similar to that of a patient who
realized “I am arguing in order to preserve my existence” (Laing,
1965, p. 43, emphasis in original).
Hill’s failure as a minister, a preacher of the “Word of
God,” was a narcissistic humiliation of the highest degree. His
words had been unable to create the fruits he had envisioned.
Another severe narcissistic blow came when the very person he
held in highest esteem, Rev. Schneider, for whose sake he had
318 MATTHIAS BEIER

relocated to Pensecola to attend church, excommunicated him

in May 2003 in a church trial when Hill was unwilling to give up
his calls for “justifiable homicide” (Norman, 2003). This disillu-
sioning experience with an idealized father figure hit him hard.
After an unsuccessful appeal of the decision, he increasingly as-
sociated with radical anti-abortion activists (Norman, 2003).
Hill tried to compensate for his unfruitful preaching three
years later when he saw an opportunity to say the outrageous
and, at least for a few months, had the attention of a national
audience. Two days after Michael Griffin killed Dr. Britton’s pre-
decessor, Dr. David Gunn, on March 10, 1993, Hill called the
Phil Donahue Show, which put him on the show defending Grif-
fin’s act as “justifiable homicide.” Appearances on ABC’s Night-
line and CNN’s Sonya Live followed (Hill, 2003) and made Hill
brag to Leonard, “Guess what? I’m a media star” (Manuel, 1994).
Hill saw the attention he received as the result of “amazing provi-
dential occurrences” (Hill, 2003). He once “confessed” to Schneider
that “I am too absorbed with making a name for myself (Norman,
2003, emphasis added).” Schneider noted that Hill had “a ten-
dency to compare himself to historical figures such as Martin
Luther” (Norman, 2003). Hill wanted to have historical signifi-
cance, a name for himself apart from his parents.
After Griffin’s trial, where Hill made himself eagerly avail-
able to reporters, ended with a conviction in March 1994, Hill
became “disappointed as the spotlight moved away and public
attention wandered elsewhere” (Sawyer, 1994). Three months
later, he made his decision to “act.” While working on used cars
for a living, he asked himself on July 21, 1994, who would act
next. Suddenly “the idea of taking action myself struck; it hit
hard. . . . I wanted to put my beliefs about defending the unborn
into consistent action” (Hill, 2003). Psychoanalytically, it is signif-
icant that the very next sentence in Hill’s (2003) online “book”
of more than two hundred pages, titled Mix My Blood with the
Blood of the Unborn, provides the only brief reference to his con-
version twenty years earlier: “God graciously converted my proud
and rebellious heart when I was seventeen.” This association
points psychologically to a connection between his conversion
experience and his decision for “action.”
Hill’s conversion was dramatic. It turned him from violent
VIOLENT CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM 319

rebel into violent saint-wannabe. The circumstances of his con-

version shed light on the connection between his murderous
“godly action” and the identification with his father. His relation-
ship with his parents, and especially with this father, shows a
preoccupation with the issue of “pride,” which points us psycho-
analytically to narcissistic dynamics. I comment psychoanalyti-
cally along the way as I now describe significant aspects of his
upbringing.
Paul Jennings Hill was born in Miami on February 6, 1954,
to Oscar and Louise Hill (Verhovek, 1994). Soon after his birth,
the family moved to Coral Gables, Florida, where he and his two
sisters grew up. His father worked as an airline pilot (Sawyer,
1994) and was frequently absent from home. During his years of
“fame,” Hill almost never mentioned his parents, his sisters, or
his childhood. His parents, in turn, always “declined to com-
ment” when reached by reporters. We know enough from wit-
nesses who knew the family and from other sources to recon-
struct some of the basic dynamics significant here.
Many of the hundreds of news reports on Hill refer to a
police report in Coral Gables which stated that in April 1971,
Hill’s father signed an arrest warrant against his son on assault
charges (Verhovek, 1994). Paul Hill, age seventeen, had assaulted
his father when his parents pressured him to seek drug treat-
ment. He was doing “first marijuana, then LSD,” and stole to
support his habit (Hooten, 1999). His relationship with his par-
ents was “strained” and characterized by constant “run-ins” (Man-
uel, 1994). Hooten (1999), editor of Focus on the Family’s Citizen
Magazine, dug substantially past the police report and wrote his
article in form of a letter addressed to Paul Hill. Hooten tried
to understand

how you came to be. How your parents, both devout Christians,
tried to raise you proper in the middle-class community of Coral
Gables, Fla. Yes, Oscar and Louise were proud of their son, good-
looking, athletic and popular with the girls. But they couldn’t con-
trol you. Your blond hair grew, and so did your rebellion. You
were obnoxious and violent, you stole and did drugs; first mari-
juana, then LSD. At age 17 you split, sleeping in stairwells and on
an island in the Florida Keys. [emphasis added]
320 MATTHIAS BEIER

Hill rebelled against the pride his parents had in him. Jeff
Sloman, a neighbor who grew up down the road from the Hill
home, recalled that “Paul’s father seemed very proud of him.
When Paul made the football team [at Coral Gables Senior High],
his dad came over to my house and . . . was just busting out with pride.
Not long after that, Paul quit the team” (Sawyer, 1994, emphasis
added). Hill experienced the father’s pride as a form of control.
He did not want to be on his father’s team. He wanted to shut
his father out, not let him in. He was not proud of his parents
and did not want their pride. He wanted to make a name for
himself. In his experience, the parent’s pride came at a price:
accepting it would have allowed them to control him by creating
him in the image they wanted him to be. Their pride felt “engulf-
ing” (Laing, 1965, p. 43; Schulman, 2003, p. 299) and threatened
to annihilate him. Accepting it would have turned him into a
mere tool for the narcissistic satisfaction of his “proud parents.”
As Laing’s (1965) patient Peter, who felt guilty for “just being at
all,” put it: He “deeply resented what he felt were everybody’s
efforts to make him into a saint which were ‘more or less just
for credit to themselves’” (pp. 122–123). Hill rebelled against los-
ing his identity by being created in the image of his “devout Christian”
parents. He did everything possible contrary to what “devout
Christian” fundamentalist parents could have been proud of: drugs,
stealing, disobedience, and even attending the Woodstock con-
cert in 1969, at age fifteen. Hill turned his back on the parents’
religion. Bob Travis, who attended the same church as Hill’s
family, recalled that the teenager “Paul was not yet interested in
religion,” as his parents hoped he would be. Instead “he was
interested in girls,” “carefree and rebellious . . . , a strong-willed
person” (Sawyer, 1994).
Hill’s temporary split from his parents by running away to
an island in the Florida Keys can be seen psychoanalytically as
an attempt to finally run away from his oedipal ego ideal and to
regress to being a self-sufficient island unto himself. Yet helpless-
ness led him back home. He could not yet live on his own psy-
chologically and spiritually. The resentment at needing “the non-
self,” “the object,” fanned the flames of his narcissistic rage and
led to a final confrontation with the father.
VIOLENT CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM 321

You came home on your own, rude as ever. The day you came to
blows with Dad, Oscar decided he’d had enough. He pressed
charges for assault. The police shakedown turned up a bag of
marijuana, and 10 days in jail later, the sergeant gave you a
choice: go straight or go to prison. You agreed, reluctantly.
(Hooten, 1999)

One account adds that “his father turned over 11 more such
bags” of marijuana (Sawyer, 1994). Hill’s contentious relation-
ship with his father had come to a climax—and the father had
“won.” The father had been able to control his son and expose
him to the full weight of the governmental police powers. Mani-
festly, Hill decided to submit. For now. Twenty years later he
would projectively cast his entire struggle for “the unborn” as a
battle to “cast off the shackles of passive submission to the state”
(Hill, 2003). The act of killing the abortion doctor gave him
great “relief” because in projected form he finally had resisted
“passive submission.” The moment Hill passively submitted to
and identified with his policing, “oedipal” father was the mo-
ment when he unconsciously became an “unborn” or “aborted”
existence. His existence got lost in the desires of his father. This
is the locus where Hill identified himself with “the unborn.”
Hill’s conversion came shortly after he was released from jail. At
his construction job, a coworker was talking Jesus. You’d heard it
before, but this time something clicked. At lunch, while you
washed your face in the sink, you asked God to wash your sins
away. The conversion was dramatic. The drug use ceased, replaced
by health food, weightlifting and evangelism. The new Paul was
outgoing and well-liked, but he would not tolerate compromise.
(Hooten, 1999)

Washing face meant saving face. Hill converted to the image

of the son he believed his parents wanted him to be. He became
active in church, attended a Bible college, then went to Re-
formed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, where he
was introduced to anti-abortion activism and “reconstruction-
ism,” a movement trying to restore “God’s rule” in the United
States. He married and became the father of three children. The
“split” between him and his parents became replaced by a split
within himself. He identified with the father by killing himself as
a son. This becomes clearer as we take a look at Hill’s feelings
322 MATTHIAS BEIER

minutes before the killings, which seem to have acted out his
own experience of being sacrificed by the father to the police:
“My usual zest and the zeal I expected to feel were missing. My
heart felt half dead within me—my stomach like an empty and
bottomless pit. It did not occur to me at the time but I now
wonder how Abraham felt as he walked up Mount Moriah to kill
his son. Surely his heart was heavy, very heavy, and his blood ice
cold—mine was” (Hill, 1997, emphasis added). The association
of Abraham being ready to kill his son for God and his feeling
half “dead” at the time of the killing indicate that, on the one
hand, Hill’s act of murder was repeating the object relationship
to a father by whom he unconsciously had felt killed. The dead
half of his heart was representing the son who died at seventeen.
It unconsciously motivated the killings. The other side of this
object relationship was his identification with the aggressor in
an effort to outdo him: the father turned “God” who kills the
abortion doctor, just as Abraham was willing to, but never did(!),
kill his son Isaac. This is substantiated by Hill’s thoughts about
his own children during the last outing the family had on the
beach: “as I carried and supported each child in the water, it was
as though I was offering them to God as Abraham offered his
son” (Hill, 2003).
“The action” would not have occurred if it had only been
for oedipal identifications. Hill’s action aimed at annihilating the
oedipal father in an effort to be his own omnipotent father. This
is evident from the main biblical passage he used to defend his
killings at the time: the story of the divine blessing of Abraham
killing some leaders who had taken his nephew Lot hostage
(Gen. 14:18–20). Hill’s identification with Abraham was, in fan-
tasy, a regression to primary omnipotence: Hill claimed God’s
“promise to bless Abraham, and grant him descendants as nu-
merous as the stars in the sky. I claimed that promise as my own,
and rejoiced with all my might” (Hill, 2003). “Untold millions in
this and every succeeding generation depend” on his action
(Hill, 1997). Psychologically, the grandiose vision of himself as
the person upon whom the creation of millions depended sym-
bolizes his omnipotent wish to be God the Creator of abundant
life. Compensating for his failed ministry and his excommunica-
tion from the church, Hill envisioned himself to become “fruit-
VIOLENT CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM 323

ful” for all eternity and make himself matter ultimately by having
a name for himself, known, like Abraham’s, by all. He tried to
undo the experience of existential annihilation by attempting to
be his own protective father (Abraham) who killed those leaders
(Hill’s father) who had kidnapped Lot (Hill). He created an infa-
mous name for himself, which was sufficient. He no longer
needed to refer to his family of origin in public. On the day of
his execution he reiterated, “I don’t feel remorse” (“Murderer
of Abortion Doctor,” 2003). With the oedipal ego ideal disa-
vowed, Hill could no longer feel remorse for killing the father.
His remorseless state and the notorious smile expressed the illu-
sion of paradisal self-sufficiency undisturbed by the disavowed
nonself.

CONCLUSION

Paul Hill’s case illustrates how a violent Christian fundamentalist

fights in order to matter ultimately. He killed an abortion doc-
tor, representing the oedipal father, whom he perceived as de-
stroying “unborn” life. “Unborn life” stood psychically and spirit-
ually for Hill’s unborn self, for an existence in his own right
rather than in the image of his parents. His latent aim was to
free his existence from the womb of his family. He felt he could
do so only by becoming his own self-sufficient Creator and the
savior of untold millions. He tried to save his world by destroy-
ing the world, “the world” being shorthand in fundamentalism
for the “ungodly” realm. Failure to act would have meant his
existential and “psychological annihilation” (Lifton, 2000, p. 184).
While the “action” of killing the “father” gave Hill the illusion
of self-sufficient narcissistic omnipotence, in reality he tragically
succeeded only in creating the very situation he had tried to bat-
tle: his imprisonment in the “womb” of the state and, as one
commentator put it, the execution of his “aborted life” (Brown-
ing, 2003).
My thesis is that violent destruction in the name of God
the Father is a megalomanical maneuver in which the ego, in
an attempt to overcome death, tries to destroy everything and
everyone perceived to be in the way of a self-sufficient, objectless
primary narcissism. This does not need to lead to clinical psycho-
324 MATTHIAS BEIER

sis. Instead, recognition of the “nonself” remains intact but does

not lead to “object-cathexis,” that is, to a meaningful apprecia-
tion of the nonself. The ego subsumes all of reality to its own
reason. While Hill could be very rational in his defensive argu-
ments, his reason was a reason gone mad under the spell of in-
finitized fears (Beier, 2004).
It is important to emphasize that narcissistic humiliations
experienced in relation to other people do not necessarily create
the ultimate narcissistic humiliation that fuels religious violence.
Humiliation experienced in relation to others is only the occa-
sion for the emergence of ultimate narcissistic humiliation. Hu-
miliation fuels religious violence, “absolute” violence, only when
the infinitizing self-reflective capacity of the ego turns any narcis-
sistic humiliation into a matter of life or death, of existing or not
existing. The self-reflective ego caught in ontological insecurity
endows narcissistic humiliations with their ultimate quality. Only
through the infinitizing experience of the ego do narcissistic hu-
miliations become deadly reminders of the ego’s finitude and
lack of significance. The identification of the ego with God or
the ego ideal attempts to overcome finitude, the “gap” in the
ego, and seeks to self-create ultimate significance.
While all forms of religious fundamentalism strive psycho-
logically in some sense to return to an ideally imagined original
state of the past, this usually does not lead to violence against
others as long as we are dealing with a notion of God that does
not disavow object ties, a notion of God still remaining either
on the level of secondary narcissism or on the oedipal level. It is
then that the idea of God can actually pull the ego forward
rather than backward and can be in the service of relationships
with others (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1976). The pull toward union
with God becomes lethal in rhetoric and action, however, when
God becomes primarily identified with the self-sufficient ego of
primary narcissism, for then none of the higher moral standards
of a superego identification nor the empathic identifications of
secondary narcissism remain effective, since the only morality
that remains valid is a “morality” that justifies homicide on an
individual or global level in order to achieve or preserve the illu-
sion of the ego’s or the group’s primary narcissism.
VIOLENT CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM 325

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