The Headlines

Penny for your thoughts, my dad says when he sees me curled up on the sofa in the living room, a half-eaten slice of cold toast in one hand and balancing my iPad on my knee with the other.

They’re not worth that much, I reply with a shrug.

He shuffles into the kitchen to boil the kettle.

At the start of the year, I challenged myself to read the news headlines every morning. Just the headlines. I didn’t have time to click on every interesting link, submerge myself in the digital, but very real, world of politics and disaster. Sometimes I couldn’t help it. I’d see a word, a location, a person I’d never heard of and I’d have to know more. That’s what happened today.

We need to talk about extremism and its links to Christian fundamentalism.

It was an article from the Guardian. And yes, I know, the Guardian is for people who think they ought to run the country. I don’t want to run the country, although I wouldn’t mind learning how it’s done to gain the right to critique those who do.

I thought extremism was a type of materialism. Hoarders. Perfectionists. Workaholics. Just anyone who took anything to an extreme … It’s not quite so simple, it turns out. The extremists the article mentions are anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and misogynists. Andrew Tate is mentioned by name.

My eyes wander over to where my dad is buttering a bagel fresh out the toaster. He studies it with sombre concentration. Is he an extremist? How could I tell?

He brought me up thinking I was going to Hell if I disobeyed any one of the ten commandments. He believes we are living in a period of immense tribulation, filled with corruption and great evil, before the second coming of Christ. He’s an evangelical fundamentalist, whatever that means. It makes me question, how thin is the line between a person with strong beliefs and an extremist?

But he had a heart attack last year and he doesn’t look dangerous, wiping the butter off his fingers with a tea towel.

What do extremists look like?

The photograph at the top of the article is a pixelated, black-and-white image of the two people who carried out Australia’s first Christian fundamentalist terror attack. Their faces are shadowed, floating in the centre of the image, ominous and ghost-like.

The woman looks severe. Her lips are sealed shut, tightened in a grimace that dimples her cheeks. Her eyes are stern and hard, determined. I expect her to open her mouth and tell me something that makes me say, hang on, hold up, maybe that’s a bit extreme.

But the man. His eyes are wide. His cheeks droop. His lips are parted like he’s mumbling something, like he’s frantic. He could be praying or pleading. No malice, but full of fear.

These extremists – they believe it. Really believe it. The world is going to end, we’re all going to die, they say. It’s true, they hammer down, it’s true.

I sigh and press the X on the Safari tab. The only extremists I know are hoarders and workaholics. As far as I’m aware.

Do you want the rest of this orange juice, my dad calls, shaking the carton.

I close my iPad case, set it on the coffee table.

Sure, I say, why not. And I’m left wondering …

How close, how far are these fanatics? How soon will one of them bump into me?