MORE IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER

Perhaps you think Rumors of Order is moving in the wrong direction, that the world needs more certainty, not less. Then read Karen Armstrong’s description of the new fundamentalism in her recent book, “The Battle for God.”

And keep in mind she wrote this before the 9/11 catastrophe.

“One of the most startling developments of the late twentieth century has been the emergence within every major religious tradition of a militant piety popularly known as ‘fundamentalism.’ Its manifestations are sometimes shocking.

“Fundamentalists have gunned down worshippers in a mosque, have killed doctors and nurses who work in abortion clinics, have shot their presidents, and have even toppled a powerful government. It is only a small minority of fundamentalists who commit such acts of terror, but even the most peaceful and law-abiding are perplexing because they seem so adamantly opposed to many of the most positive values of modern society.

“Fundamentalists have no time for democracy, pluralism, religious toleration, peacekeeping, free speech, or the separation of church and state. Christian fundamentalists reject the discoveries of biology and physics about the origins of life and insist that the Book of Genesis is scientifically sound in every detail.

“At a time when many are throwing off the shackles of the past, Jewish fundamentalists observe their revealed Law more stringently than ever before, and Muslim women, repudiating the freedoms of Western women, shroud themselves in veils and chadors. Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists both interpret the Arab-Israeli conflict, which began as defiantly secularist, in an exclusively religious way. Fundamentalism, moreover, is not confined to the great monotheisms. There are Buddhist, Hindu and even Confucian fundamentalisms, which also cast aside many of the painfully acquired insights of liberal culture, which fight and kill in the name of religion and strive to bring the sacred into the realm of politics and national struggle.”

A BIG SURPRISE

“This religious resurgence has taken many observers by surprise. In the middle years of the twentieth century, it was generally taken for granted that secularism was an irreversible trend and that faith would never again play a major part in world events. It was assumed that as human beings became more rational, they either would have no further need for religion or would be content to confine it to the immediately personal and private areas of their lives.

“But in the late 1970s, fundamentalists began to rebel against this secularist hegemony and started to wrest religion out of its marginal position and back to center stage. In this, at least, they have enjoyed remarkable success. Religion has once again become a force that no government can safely ignore. Fundamentalism has suffered defeats, but is it by no means quiescent. It is now an essential part of the modern scene and will certainly play an important role in the domestic and international affairs of the future. It is crucial, therefore, that we try to understand what this type of religiosity means, how and for what reasons it has developed, what it can tell us about our culture, and how best we should deal with it.

“But before we proceed, we must look briefly at the term ‘fundamentalism’ itself, which has been much criticized.”

FUNDAMENTALISM DEFINED

“American Protestants were the first to use it. In the early decades of the twentieth century, some of them started to call themselves ‘fundamentalists’ to distinguish themselves from the more ‘liberal’ Protestants, who were, in their opinion, entirely distorting the Christian faith. The fundamentalists wanted to go back to the basics and re-emphasize the ‘fundamentals’ of the Christian tradition, which they identified with a literal interpretation of Scripture and the acceptance of certain core doctrines.

“The term ‘fundamentalism’ has since been applied to reforming movements in other world faiths in a way that is far from satisfactory. It seems to suggest that fundamentalism is monolithic in all its manifestations. This is not the case. Each ‘fundamentalism’ is a law unto itself and has its own dynamic. The term also gives the impression that fundamentalists are inherently conservative and wedded to the past, whereas their ideas are essentially modern and highly innovative. The American Protestants may have intended to go back to the fundamentals, but they did so in a peculiarly modern way.

“It has also been argued that this Christian term cannot be accurately applied to movements that have entirely different priorities. Muslim and Jewish fundamentalisms, for example, are not much concerned with doctrine, which is an essentially Christian preoccupation. A literal translation of fundamentalism into Arabic gives us usuliyah, a word that refers to the study of the sources of the various rules and principles of Islamic law. Most of the activists who are dubbed ‘fundamentalists’ in the West are not engaged in this Islamic science, but have quite different concerns. The use of the term ‘fundamentalism’ is therefore quite misleading.”

EMBATTLED FORMS OF SPIRITUALITY

“Others, however, argue simply that, like it or not, the word ‘fundamentalism’ is here to stay. And I have come to agree: the term is not perfect, but it is a useful label for movements that, despite their differences, bear a strong family resemblance. At the outset of the monumental six-volume Fundamentalist Project, Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby argue that the ‘fundamentalisms’ all follow a certain pattern. They are embattled forms of spirituality, which have emerged as a response to a perceived crisis. They are engaged in a conflict with enemies whose secularist policies and beliefs seem inimical to religion itself.

“Fundamentalists do not regard this battle as a conventional political struggle but experience it as a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil. They fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identity by means of a selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past. To avoid contamination, they often withdraw from mainstream society to create a counterculture; yet fundamentalists are not impractical dreamers. They have absorbed the pragmatic rationalism of modernity, and, under the guidance of their charismatic leaders, they refine these ‘fundamentals’ so as to create an ideology that provides the faithful with a plan of action. Eventually they fight back and attempt to resacralize an increasingly skeptical world.”