Fundamentalisms: Threats and Ideologies in the Modern World 9780755624171, 9781780769509

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PREFACE

For many years fundamentalism has been quite a narrow, specialist issue, important in more conservative circles of Christianity, but more an historical curiosity than a subject for substantive scholarship. But in recent years fundamentalist beliefs and policies have become major issues in several world religions and major factors in several international crises. The questions and challenges they pose demand an attention that has hitherto been largely confined to specialist studies and limited to university classrooms. Do all ideologies have forms that simplify beliefs and demand unquestioning commitment? Is fundamentalism an unavoidable expression, in at least some cases, of strongly held beliefs and convictions? Are all fundamentalisms a threat to more moderate expressions of belief, as well as to those outside the belief system? Somewhat surprisingly, fundamentalism has not received the scholarly attention it deserves – and requires. This volume seeks to remedy that deficit. The following essays focus on several contemporary fundamentalisms, the beliefs they express, the attitudes they foster, and the policies they promote. They bring together an amazing range of information and experience, insight and critique, and should make a significant contribution to understanding the fundamentalist phenomenon as it impinges on traditional religions, on national priorities and on international policies. The chapters here published are the principal fruit of a focused consultation organised by the British Academy in London in February 2013, edited and refined in the light of the consultation itself, and well reflecting its value. The conversations would not have been possible

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without the energetic organisation of Tim Brassell of the British Academy, and the concluding discussion was chaired by Sir Adam Roberts, President of the British Academy. To all concerned: for a memorable day, many thanks. As also to Alex Wright of I.B.Tauris for making the fruits of these labours more widely available.

Bibliography Goodman, M., Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (London: Penguin, 2008).

CONTRIBUTORS

Karen Armstrong, OBE, FRSL, ‘a prominent and prolific religious historian’ (Washington Post), is the award-winning author of A History of God (1993), The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2000) and Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014). James D. G. Dunn is Emeritus Professor of Divinity at Durham University. He is the author of many benchmark books in the field of New Testament studies, including Jesus and the Spirit (1975), Christology in the Making (1980), The Partings of the Ways between Christianity and Judaism and their Significance for Christianity (1991) and Christianity in the Making (3 vols. 2003, 2009, 2015). Peter Herriot was formerly Professor of Organisational Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Religious Fundamentalism and Social Identity (2007) and of Religious Fundamentalism: Global, Local and Personal (2008). Ed Husain is Adjunct Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York. A cofounder of The Quilliam Foundation (now Quilliam), he is the author of The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left (2007).

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Laura Janner-Klausner, a prominent voice in Britain on interfaith relations, is a British-Israeli rabbi who in 2011 became the first Senior Rabbi to the Movement for Reform Judaism. John Lennox is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College, Oxford. His several books on science and religion include God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (2009) and Seven Days That Divide the World: The Beginning According to Genesis and Science (2011). Julius Lipner, FBA, is Professor Emeritus of Hinduism and the Comparative Study of Religion at the University of Cambridge. His publications include the seminal textbook Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (1994, second edition 2010). Diarmaid MacCulloch, Kt, FBA, FSA, FRHistS, is Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. His bestselling books have won several major awards, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Thomas Cranmer: A Life (1996), the National Book Critics Circle Award and the British Academy Book Prize for Reformation: Europe’s House Divided: 1490–1700 (2003) and the Hessell-Tiltman Prize and the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature for A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009). Peter R Neumann is Professor of Security Studies and Director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (which he founded in 2008) at King’s College London. He is the author of Old and New Terrorism (2009) and co-author of The Strategy of Terrorism (2008). Martyn Percy is Dean of Christ Church, Oxford and was formerly Principal of Ripon College, Cuddesdon. From 1999– 2006 he served as a Director and Council member of the Advertising Standards Authority. His publications include Fundamentalism: Church and Society (2002) and Anglicanism: Confidence, Commitment and Communion (2013).

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Linda Woodhead, MBE, is Professor in the Sociology of Religion at Lancaster University. With the Rt Hon Charles Clarke she co-founded the Westminster Faith Debates in 2011. Her books include An Introduction to Christianity (2004), The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality (2004) and Christianity: A Very Short Introduction (2005).

INTRODUCTION THE IMPORTANCE OF STUDYING THE PHENOMENON OF FUNDAMENTALISM Diarmaid MacCulloch

In the history of Christianity, several well-known group identities started as sneers or belittling terms: a familiar example is ‘Methodism’, and another is ‘Quaker’. It is indeed implied by no less an authority than the New Testament that the word ‘Christianity’ itself, when first used in Syrian Antioch, was another instance.1 Such pejorative uses are external descriptions of the other, which have gradually been proudly adopted by the subject: ‘them’ have become ‘us’. The history of the word ‘fundamentalism’ takes the opposite direction: from ‘us’ to ‘them’. It took its name from a defiant but confident Protestant Evangelical initiative in publishing, uniting mainstream Evangelicals either side of the Anglophone Atlantic in confrontation with liberalising moves in Protestant theology. Among the 64 authors of The Fundamentals were respected mainstream Christian theologians such as the Scottish Free Church Professor James Orr and the Anglican Bishop of Durham Handley Moule, whom it is not too fanciful to see as possible candidates for Fellowships of the British Academy, which was founded in the same decade. There are still Evangelical Christians who glory in the description ‘fundamentalist’, but now for the most part, it is used as a put-down, not least in many Christian circles. Particularly for journalists, it has also become a vaguer

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put-down with much wider reference, like another former in-term which has turned into a scattergun term of abuse, ‘Fascist’. Methodists, Quakers and Christians have achieved a certain social respectability; Fundamentalists and Fascists have lost it. Indeed, the present state of the two labels ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘fascist’ has defeat built in: fascism, once widely hailed as the way forward for millions of people, failed in its bid for power. When it is used today, by all save a happily unrepresentative handful, it is a word intended to discredit. As with fascism, once upon a time, fundamentalist outlooks could plausibly have been seen as the future for Western Christianity. Only a decade ago, it seemed as if the power of fundamentalism really would return as the decisively shaping agent in the electoral politics of the United States of America, but that moment appears to have passed. While Christian fundamentalism is a powerful phenomenon across world Christianity, it is plain that it has not succeeded in its original address to the societies and establishments of the West. That may not, of course, mean that it has failed in a wider sphere. There is no point in being squeamish about saying that fundamentalism negates all the principles on which a scholarly community like that of the British Academy is founded. Not surprisingly, Christian fundamentalists rail against ‘The Academy’, by which they mean something wider than our own beloved institution. The fundamentalist mindset detests open enquiry; it dismisses as irrelevant or is baffled by many of the concerns that preoccupy scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. The concept of ‘The Academy’ embodies an attitude of liberal scholarship that is always poised to act as a destructive solvent on the certainties that the authors of The Fundamentals championed, and which is inherent in the ethos of Western universities – for all that fundamentalists have habitually founded teaching institutions that ape the structures of traditional Humboldt-style universities, in an attempt to develop a distinctively fundamentalist scholarly and rational tradition free from liberal taint. ‘Liberalism’ has indeed always been a primarily theological term of pejorative art for fundamentalists, which is why Europeans find its usage so puzzling in the secular politics of a still pervasively Protestant traditional culture in the United States – particularly when Europeans see obviously liberal American politicians fighting shy of calling themselves liberals.

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If fundamentalism is a declining (even risible) phenomenon in the Christian cultures of its birth, what might be the point of devoting a collection of essays to it? I am sure that 40 years ago, when I was an undergraduate, most academics would have raised eyebrows at the idea of the British Academy symposium on fundamentalism from which these essays sprang; or at best, they would have seen it as a specialist event for those interested in internal Christian arguments. The future of world cultures then seemed set by models of ‘secularisation’, and religion was apparently poised to wither away as a decisive social force. As James Dunn points out in his contextual essay on origins and outcomes, geopolitical events from 1977 made a mockery of this sanguine outlook. In our society’s efforts to understand those huge changes in global politics, the ‘fundamentalist’ label has taken on a much wider reference than once it had. So now this collection takes us to other world religions, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism, and although we have not chosen to include a view of Buddhism, it is worrying to hear reports in 2013–14 of the persecution of Muslims in Buddhist-majority Burma as a result of what sounds very much like fundamentalist rhetoric. Nor have we restricted our consideration to religion. It is possible for a certain sort of positivist Western scientific outlook to exhibit some of the characteristics of a fundamentalist mindset, often with direct reference to religious fundamentalism, whose crudities it sees as conveniently adding justification for its own project. What is at the heart of the multiform fundamentalism that is now so important in the world? It is an inability to show indifference to difference, an intolerance of plurality. As several contributors here point out, this was not the usual characteristic of traditional societies. Whatever their theoretical intentions, their usual characteristic was pluralism, with parallel identities and language-groups living side by side, even when one of those groups exercised hegemony. That was a pluralism won out of historical experience, conditioned by protracted negotiations between different groups refined over time. Fundamentalists make little attempt to explore the pasts of societies, which they claim to be restoring to ancient traditions. It is a general characteristic of self-styled traditionalists that they only know a select part of their own tradition. They seem incapable of hearing or understanding the metaphors and figures of speech and thought that pervade their own historic literature, particularly sacred literature.

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Fundamentalism is a symptom of modernity, yet also a rejection of it. It abhors the habit of neutral comparison which is such a distinctive and original aspect of Enlightenment thinking. Neutrality is a threat to anger: fundamentalists are generally angry, and they are angry because they are frightened, since rightly or wrongly they feel powerless. It is not that contacts with the other are novel in societies affected by fundamentalism, but rather those contacts have newly generated a sense that they may lead to the end of the society in which the fundamentalist lives and feels comfortable. Very often, admittedly, that sense is quite right. So fundamentalism is characterised by struggle, conflict. As Martyn Percy says in Chapter 3, without opposition, fundamentalism dies. Fundamentalism impresses by its vitality. One of the symptoms of its modernity is its appetite for using the technology of modernity, from using the internet to spread its message and create group identities across the world, to various alarmingly modern ways of spreading mass terror. The very fact that as a term it has the varied references dealt with in these essays is an indication of growth and adaptability. Why does it have such wide appeal? One can point to particular historic causes: Laura Janner-Klausner’s essay suggests how the shock of the Holocaust called into question the validity of Judaism’s alliance with the Enlightenment, while in the Middle East, the humiliation of Arab regimes by Western powers beginning with the British and French Empires, and continuing with American imperium, makes the fundamentalist appeal to a supposedly pure Islam as the sole source of regional identity seem more plausible than it was in the early days of Arab nationalism. Yet behind all these contingent causes, one can trace a common theme in religious fundamentalisms: their fury at the challenge to traditional patriarchy posed by the changing role both of women and of gay people. In both cases, as more generally in the pluralisms of traditional society, there were traditional spaces in which women and homosexuals could find means of self-expression while leaving the leading role of heterosexual men unchallenged. That is so no longer. It is interesting to observe the same strident rhetoric against feminism and gay liberation uniting fundamentalists who otherwise regard each other’s religious rigidity as a symptom of their suitability for hell. Putin’s Russia, Museveni’s Uganda and the Ayatollahs’ Iran all wield violence against gay people and women in order to preserve a caricature version of the past.

INTRODUCTION

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Yet the sexual pluralism that so enrages religious fundamentalism and gives it its widest appeal will probably also ultimately prove its solvent. It is difficult for heterosexual masculinity, a minority identity among human beings even at its most strident, to prevail against the majority for ever. Janner-Klausner mischievously suggests that the concealed smartphone will prove the nemesis of ultra-Orthodox closed communities: it is a lesson that applies more widely. In the meantime, fundamentalism will cause more violence and pain to those struggling to neutralise its message: those who stress nuance rather than strident simplicities. Part of the struggle for nuance is precisely to listen to the shouts of pain and anger that give fundamentalism its energy, and to show more imaginative sympathy than fundamentalists are capable of displaying – or indeed, more imaginative sympathy than scientific fundamentalists show towards religions. In particular, those who treasure the Enlightenment must avoid the trap of identifying the religions of the world, in all their glorious internal complexity and variety, with the fundamentalisms that those religions have spawned. Hence the importance of the various essays in this volume in setting out the problems and, just as importantly, suggesting some solutions.

Notes 1. Acts 11.26; see M. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilisations (London: Penguin, 2008), pp. 539– 40.

CHAPTER 1 THE ROOTS OF CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM IN AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM James D. G. Dunn

In this chapter I describe the beginnings of Protestant fundamentalism, and go on to analyse its central characteristics, also drawing attention to its continuing influence on Christianity today and on the national politics of the United States of America.1 We should begin, however, by at least noting some problems in any conceptualisation of ‘fundamentalism’. An initial problem is that the term ‘fundamentalism’ may be too much of an abstraction from what is actually a wide range of traditionalist views in diverse ideological and religious systems. Is ‘fundamentalism’ a universal phenomenon, or should we only speak of a diverse set of fundamentalisms?2 Should we even speak of ‘Protestant fundamentalism’ as though it was a single, coherent phenomenon?3 Again, it is arguable that what we now refer to as a ‘fundamentalist’ attitude or mind-set can be found in earlier centuries.4 But if fundamentalism is defined as a reaction against modernism, then it is itself a modern phenomenon.5 A third problem is that ‘fundamentalist’ has become a pejorative term in most public discourse, ‘a synonym for bigotry, intellectual immaturity, fanaticism, and sometimes violence’, ‘an intolerant epithet for those we regard as intolerant [. . .] a label that immediately delegitimates’.6 So is the discussion loaded against ‘fundamentalism’ from the start? Should we

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try using another term, like ‘foundationalism’,7 to describe the view that any system, religious or otherwise, needs some firm or fixed foundational truths on which to build? In fact, the actual origin of the term ‘fundamentalism’ can be dated with some precision. As is generally agreed, the origin lies in the publication of a series of 12 small matching books, almost large pamphlets, entitled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, edited initially by A. C. Dixon, and subsequently by R. A. Torrey, and published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles from 1910 to 1915. Each volume was made up of between five and 11 essays, the authors including well-known conservative Protestant scholars of the day. The authors were mainly Americans, notably the famous B. B. Warfield, Professor of Theology at Princeton Seminary, and the equally famous revivalist, R. A. Torrey. But they also included several eminent British names: for example, the highly regarded Presbyterian apologist James Orr, Professor at the Free Church College in Glasgow; G. Campbell Morgan, a noted British evangelist and minister of Westminster Chapel, London; H. C. G. Moule, an admired commentator on the New Testament and Bishop of Durham; and W. H. Griffith Thomas, formerly Principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. Three million copies of the 12 volumes were dispatched free of charge to every pastor, professor and student of theology in America.8 The motivation behind the volumes is clear: the editors and authors perceived that their faith, what they would have regarded as the orthodox beliefs of Protestantism, indeed of Christianity, were under attack. The attacks were seen to be multiple and all the more threatening for that reason. It was a first order priority that these attacks should be withstood and opposed.9 One was the influence of liberal theology, which spread from Germany in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. This was perceived as undermining fundamental doctrines of Christianity. Hence the first two essays in the first volume of The Fundamentals are on ‘The Virgin Birth of Christ’, by Orr, and ‘The Deity of Christ’, by Warfield; and there is a later essay on ‘The Certainty and Importance of the Bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the Dead’, by Torrey.10 Here it is not unimportant to recognise that The Fundamentals were a Protestant equivalent to the Roman Catholic condemnation of ‘modernism’ in Pius X’s encyclical of 1907. For modernism was

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expressive of the same Liberalism which sought to adapt Catholic faith to the intellectual Zeitgeist. In the Catholic hierarchy’s view, modernism was just another name for liberal Protestantism.11 Ironically The Fundamentals riposted by asking ‘Is Romanism Christianity?’ and depicting Rome as ‘The Antagonist of the Nation’. As a point more worthy of note, however, it is this sense that ‘liberalism’ inevitably involves a slackening of what should, or must be, regarded as firm and incontrovertible truths, which gives the term ‘liberal’ such negative, and indeed threatening overtones in conservative Christian circles to this day. The Fundamentals also contained attacks on socialism and modern philosophy, all seen as threatening to undermine divinely revealed truths. But one of the most dangerous threats was perceived to be the spreading influence of Darwin’s theory of evolution, undermining a biblical view of the cosmos as divinely created and of the human species as specially created by God. Hence essays in The Fundamentals on ‘The Passing of Evolution’, by the geologist G. F. Wright, and on the ‘Decadence of Darwinism’. For the contributors to The Fundamentals it was not just the answers that were the problem; even to ask the questions, or to think that it was appropriate to subject fundamental matters of faith to questioning, was unacceptable. The most famous or notorious early clash between fundamentalists and modernists was the so-called ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ in 1925, when a high school teacher, John Scopes, was accused of violating a Tennessee legal act that made it unlawful to teach evolution in any state-funded school.12 The still ongoing issue as to whether ‘creationism’ or ‘intelligent design’ should have a place in the school curriculum marks the current phase of the same debate. However, the key threat perceived was the threat to the Bible and to its authority. In this case the great bogey was ‘higher criticism’, that is the subjection of the Bible to critical question. Here again it was German theological scholarship that was seen as most to be blamed. The Enlightenment had encouraged the application of scientific method to the study of the Bible, its historical claims subjected to scientific historical scrutiny. But ‘scientific criticism’ had undermined the fundamental concepts of revelation and miracle. The influence of Baruch Spinoza and David Hume was seen as destructive of faith in the supernatural.13 To question whether Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, or whether there was more

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than one Isaiah, or whether all the letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament had actually been written by Paul himself – such questions were intolerable. Accordingly we find essays in The Fundamentals on the ‘History of the Higher Criticism’ and ‘Fallacies of the Higher Criticism’, and on such subjects as the ‘Inspiration of the Bible’ and ‘The Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch’. This brings us to the heart of Protestant fundamentalism – the central role of the Bible as the infallible authority of Christian faith. As James Barr notes, in his devastating critique of fundamentalism, ‘the question of scriptural authority is the one question of theology, that takes precedence over all others’.14 Again we note the parallel with Roman Catholicism, in its similarly instinctive conviction that for faith to be sure, for faith to be certain, the authority underpinning it must be infallible. The Catholic dogma on Papal infallibility, when the Pope speaks ex cathedra,15 mirrors the Protestant insistence on the infallibility of the Bible, while at the same time the distinction between Pope and Bible indicates the deep divide which conservative Protestantism sees between itself and Catholicism. As the heart of Protestant fundamentalism this feature deserves more analysis. Its central importance is indicated by the fact that, for instance, the term ‘infallibility’ is soon seen to be inadequate. It can become a weasel word, taken as referring simply or more to the impact made by the Bible rather than to its creation.16 Likewise the term ‘inspiration’ can be taken as equivalent to ‘inspiring’, describing the Bible’s effect rather than how it came about. A stronger word is needed, and that is ‘inerrancy’. One can have complete certainty in what the Bible teaches, because it is without error, inerrant. ‘If the Bible contains errors it is not God’s Word itself, however reliable it may be [. . .] God’s character demands inerrancy.’17 The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) includes Article XII – ‘We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.’18 Again the parallel with the Catholic dogma is worth noting, since in the case of Papal infallibility too, ‘infallibility means more than exemption from actual error; it means exemption from the possibility of error’.19 In Protestant fundamentalism, the assumption of and focus on inerrancy leads, naturally, to read the Bible literally,20 to take literally the Reformation’s insistence on the primacy of the ‘plain sense’, the sensus literalis.21 The Reformation’s insistence on the plain sense, of course, was

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in reaction to the mediaeval Church’s assumption that the literal was only one of the four senses that may be read from scripture – the allegorical, the moral and the anagogical being the others. Martin Luther had strongly insisted on the plain or literal sense and dismissed mediaeval allegorising as so much rubbish.22 But in Protestant reaction to Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis, the ‘plain sense’ meant that when Genesis says the world was created in six days, that must mean six 24-hour periods of time. Or when one Gospel says that Jesus healed a blind man when he entered Jericho, and another that he healed a blind man when exiting from Jericho, and a third that he healed two blind men when leaving Jericho,23 the only acceptable solution is that Jesus must have done all the healings, one on the way in, another on the way out, and another two on the way out – not one, or two, but four. Here we see a basic flaw in Protestant fundamentalism, indicated also in the assumption that to maintain or to demonstrate the Bible’s inspiration is all that is needed. For the fundamentalist there is no distinction between inspiration and revelation.24 But to focus attention on inspiration fails to see the larger problem of interpretation: how to understand what has been written.25 Ironically, this was an issue that the mediaeval Church had seen all too clearly in its use of allegorical interpretation to explain difficult passages in the Bible, an issue that the insistence on ‘plain sense’ and on meaning without error had obscured. But for a fundamentalist, a ‘plain sense’ reading of the text is not in fact an interpretation.26 This unwillingness to take seriously the issue of interpretation includes the unwillingness to press the question of whether the Bible has different genres. Fundamentalists would certainly bridle at any suggestion that the poetic imagery in Isaiah’s talk of the mountains bursting into song and the trees clapping their hands (Isa. 55.12) should be read literally.27 Nevertheless, the claim that the Bible teaches inerrant truth covers everything that the Bible teaches, whether doctrine, or history, or science, or geography, or geology or any other disciplines.28 And many fundamentalists find it necessary to insist that the opening chapters of Genesis be read as straightforward history. Here the introduction of the term ‘myth’, to denote a different kind of literature, immediately causes fundamentalist hackles to rise. For to the fundamentalist, ‘myth’ can mean nothing more than ‘not history’, and so ‘not true’ as denying the historical facticity of the narrative so described.

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The conception of ‘myth’ as an unfolding of an idea, or a view of the world, by clothing it in narrative form, is anathema to them, or at least the interpretation of any biblical narratives in these terms. Similarly, to even raise the interpretative possibility that the Old Testament book of Jonah is a novelistic story and not an historical account is simply unacceptable. Most striking, however, is the typically fundamentalist reading of the last book of the Bible, the apocalypse of John, or Revelation. That the normal argument for a literal reading of a text should not apply to a book of often bizarre cosmic symbolism might seem obvious to any who are familiar with the genre of apocalypses. A book of symbols should be read symbolically, or indeed allegorically. But fundamentalists continue to insist on what they regard as a ‘plain sense’ reading of Revelation, as providing a prediction of events building up to the end of this world. From the beginning of fundamentalism as such, fundamentalists in the United States have typically believed in a pre-tribulation rapture. That is, they believe that believers will be raptured,29 transported to heaven prior to the time of great tribulation predicted in Revelation, when those remaining on earth will be subjected to the evil rule of the Antichrist.30 The Scofield Reference Bible, first published in 1909, with notes that saw in Revelation a timetable of events leading to the end of history, gave such views a considerable boost, particularly as it was published by Oxford University Press, and not least because the soon following World War I seemed an ominous portent of Armageddon. Belief in the rapture is amazingly widespread in the States. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth31 has reportedly sold between 15 million and 35 million copies. Lindsey proclaimed that the rapture was imminent, based on world conditions at the time (1970), with the Cold War figuring prominently in his predictions of impending Armageddon. He suggested, for example, that the beast with seven heads and ten horns, referred to in the book of Revelation (17.7) was the European Economic Community, which indeed expanded to consist of ten member states between 1981 and 1986 (though now, as the European Union, it has 27 member states). First published shortly after the Six-Day War, the book has done much to explain and to boost American evangelical support for the state of Israel, whose foundation they see as in fulfillment of biblical prophecy and as part of the same divine plan, ‘the greatest single sign indicating the imminent return

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of Jesus Christ’, according to Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority.32 And the popularity of the doctrine of the pre-tribulation rapture is further indicated by Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series of novels,33 16 in number, which have sold tens of millions of copies; several of them reached number 1 in the best-selling lists and several have been made into films. When it comes to different versions of an event or episode in recorded history in the Bible the level of fundamentalist anxiety increases noticeably. The natural fundamentalist instinct is to deny that there can be any contradictions, and that any inconsistencies must be in the eye of the reader rather than in the text itself.34 This applies to some Old Testament narratives, and to tensions between the accounts of the apostle Paul’s activities in the Acts of the Apostles and references to the same episodes in Paul’s own letters. But the main focus of concern is the different versions of what Jesus did and said in the four New Testament Gospels. Here the same natural response is harmonisation – not two or three different accounts of the same event, but three accounts of different events. I have already instanced the account of Jesus healing a blind man, or blind men, on entering or leaving Jericho. The fact that Jesus’ ‘cleansing’ of the Jerusalem Temple is set at the beginning of Jesus’ mission by John’s Gospel, and at the end of his mission by the other three New Testament Gospels, simply means that Jesus ‘cleansed’ the Temple twice.35 Another example is Peter’s denials of Jesus when Jesus has been arrested for questioning by the High Priest.36 The accounts of Peter’s three denials are different, denials before different people and in different circumstances, so different that resolution of the problem by harmonisation results in the assertion that Peter must actually have denied Jesus six times.37 Such a conclusion could be drawn, in defence of the dogma that none of the accounts could be inaccurate or wrong, even though each of the four accounts agree that Peter denied Jesus (only) three times.38 A further aspect of the Protestant fundamentalist mindset is the sense that orthodox belief is a complete package, an interlocked system. If questions are allowed on the virgin birth, whether Jesus was or could have been born of a virgin, that does not simply cast doubt on the virgin birth, it also picks out a thread and begins to pull the thread so that the whole system quickly unravels. Indeed, so integrated is the system that even minor details become as important as central doctrines; if an error is

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detected in some historical detail, the whole system collapses. The image put before students from fundamentalist backgrounds is that of ‘the slippery slope’. If a person puts a foot on the slippery slope, then there is no stopping place and he will plunge directly into the abyss of disbelief or heresy. If you cannot believe all, you cannot believe at all.39 One hears the same argument in Catholic polemics and apologetics. It is literally a case of ‘all or nothing’. If a book can be fallible in what it says about astronomy or biology, how can you trust it in matters of religious faith and doctrine? If you cannot believe the story of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea on dry ground (Exod. 14.22), or in one of Jesus’ healing miracles, then you have pulled the plug, and the cistern of faith will drain away completely. And, sadly, if inevitably, this presumption becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in several cases, the student concluding, ‘If I can’t believe everything the Bible tells me, then I can’t believe anything it tells me.’ Fundamentalism is antithetical to and disastrous for any open and inquiring mind. Underlying the rise of Protestant fundamentalism is the desire for certainty. If terms like ‘inerrancy’ and ‘harmonisation’ are key aspects of the Protestant fundamentalist mindset, then so also is the term ‘certainty’ – the assumption that if one is summoned to believe, then what is to be believed must be certain. Again, a similar observation could be made with respect to Roman Catholicism.40 To be sure, this desire for certainty is in some ways admirable in its motivation. It wants clarity, because it wants commitment. How can we really be committed to a cause if we do not know, clearly and without doubt, what it is we are committed to? The desire is for a firm rock in a sea of otherwise constant change, for a truth unchanging in the face of so-called ‘progress’ with its seemingly endless confusion and dilution of moral standards. In a period marked by social, ideological and political uncertainty, the appeal of such fundamentalist certainty is obvious, and goes a long way to explain the success of conservative and fundamentalist churches in evangelism and church planting. The focus in Protestant fundamentalism is on scripture, precisely because written formulations hold out the promise of such certainty, certainty of historical fact, certainty of worship practice and ethical prescription, certainty of theological proposition. Not least of fundamentalism’s appeal for so many Protestants is this claim to honour scripture and to give it its due place as the definition and prime

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determinant of the religion to which it bears testimony. The assumption is that God the ultimate Absolute has revealed himself absolutely. ‘What Scripture says, God says.’41 Failure to honour God’s chosen means of selfrevelation is failure to honour God. For the fundamentalist such a failure properly to acknowledge scripture is itself a kind of blasphemy. And a post-modernism that disperses all such absolutes and makes certainty of any reading of the text impossible is simply anathema. Where this desire for certainty, what Karen Armstrong refers to as ‘this lust for certainty’,42 becomes entirely questionable is in its basic confusion of faith with certainty. The assumption that faith deals in divine certainties has a long history. Notably John Henry Newman preferred the term ‘certitude’, but it came to the same thing. Faith had to do with certitude, because it was ‘divine faith’, it was faith in what had been divinely revealed, the acceptance of truth revealed by divine grace. As Newman put it, ‘Certitude’ or ‘to be certain is to know that one knows’.43 Ironically the most famously radical twentieth century New Testament scholar, Rudolf Bultmann, posed the issue of certainty of faith in antithesis to the uncertainty of historical knowledge.44 But a crucial question was too little asked: whether we should expect certainty in matters of faith, whether an invulnerable ‘certainty’ is the appropriate language for faith, whether faith is itself an ‘absolute’. It was the Enlightenment assumption that necessary truths of reason are like mathematical axioms, and that what is in view is the certain QED of mathematical proof, which has skewed the whole discussion. But faith moves in a totally different realm from mathematics. The language of faith uses words like ‘confidence’ and ‘assurance’ rather than ‘certainty’. Faith deals in trust, not in mathematical calculations. Nor is it to be defined simply as ‘assent to propositions as true’ (in Newman’s terms). Walking ‘by faith’ is different from what Paul calls walking ‘by sight’ (2 Cor. 5.7). Faith is commitment, not just conviction. Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh, in his recent movingly honest autobiography, Leaving Alexandria, points out that, ‘The opposite of faith is not doubt, it is certainty. Where you have certainty, you don’t need faith.’45 The fact, too little appreciated by fundamentalists, is that faith as trust is never invulnerable to questions. Rather, faith lives in dialogue with questions. Faith-without-doubt is a rare commodity, which few (if any) have experienced for any length of time. On the contrary, doubt is the inoculation that keeps faith

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strong in face of unbelief. Whereas, it is the ‘lust for certainty’ that leads to fundamentalism absolutising its own faith claims and dismissing all others. The basic failing of fundamentalism here is the failure to recognise that human speech, all human speech, even if inspired by the Spirit of God, is simply inadequate to express divine reality. By definition, the God in whom believers believe is beyond human sight and human comprehension, and so also beyond human speech. Inevitably, then, any attempt to express God’s will in human terms, however inspired, will involve a degree of ambiguity and uncertainty. Words are rarely precision instruments, except when used as rigorously controlled technical terms, that is in narrow specialisms or in legal documents; and even then the control often slips, and lawyers, QCs and judges earn their keep. Anyone who is familiar with the problems of translating from one language into another will appreciate the point at once. What Christian fundamentalists have forgotten is the prohibition expressly emphasised from the beginning of the Old Testament, forbidding the making of images of God in wood or stone (Exod. 20.4). For God, we are thereby warned, is un-image-able, that is literally unimaginable. And words about God, and claims to God’s revelation of himself and his will, are equally images, verbal images, which can never get beyond metaphor and analogy. The point of metaphor is that it is not literal. The point of analogy is that the nearest we can get to talking about the subject is that it is something like the analogous subject. The danger of fundamentalism, then, is that it takes the metaphor as literal, it takes the analogy to be the thing itself. In short, it makes the verbal imagery of words into idols. Fundamentalism, in the last analysis, is idolatrous. To be fair, classic Christianity has gone some way down the same road, in its creedal statements, which try to define the indefinable, to insist that certain words are absolute, absolutely necessary in confessing faith in God – even though theologians are well enough aware that words change their meanings and that in some creedal statements metaphors are strained to breaking point. So Christian fundamentalism is actually only pushing to extreme a tendency evident in all Christian dogmas. The craving for certainty also ignores the historical particularity of most of the biblical texts. Even poetic and wisdom texts reflect the culture of their age. But narrative and historical texts, prophecies and

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epistles all have a degree of historical particularity without taking account of which the texts cannot be adequately understood. But the Protestant fundamentalist wants to hear the biblical text as the word of God now. Indeed, Christian liturgy typically says after any or all readings from the Christian Bible, ‘This is the word of God’ – not, ‘This was the word of God in the eighth century BCE or in the first century CE ’, but ‘the word of God today’. A fundamentalist mindset takes this liturgical pronouncement with all seriousness. The text can be abstracted from its historical context, and its meaning and application given a timeless reference. God the absolute has spoken his word; his word shares the same absolute character. This is nowhere clearer than in the current debate about the potential role of women in church leadership. It counts for nothing that Deborah was one of the judges of Israel during Israel’s early settlement of Canaan (Judges 4– 5), or that the woman Junia was eminent among the apostles before Paul and probably founded one or more of the earliest churches in Rome (Rom. 16.7). What counts decisively is that two passages in the Pauline corpus of letters seem to indicate clearly that women should be subject to men and should not teach or have authority over men (1 Cor. 14.34–35; 1 Tim. 2.11–12). Accordingly, male headship is a prominent dogma in fundamentalist circles in the United States, with strong echoes among conservative evangelicals in this country, as the 2012 vote delaying the appointment of women bishops in the Church of England Synod reminds us. In their view no account is, or should be, taken of the strong patriarchal character of ancient society. On the contrary, fundamentalism can be categorised precisely as a protest against what is perceived as the assault on the patriarchal principles that fundamentalists believe should still determine the structure and operation of society.46 Nor is the likelihood even worthy of consideration, that the texts in view speak of wives and husbands, rather than of women and men in general. But the Greek word (gyneˆ) can also mean ‘wife’: what Paul says is that ‘If they [the women, gynaikes] want to learn something, let them ask their men [that is, their husbands] in their own home’ (1 Cor. 14.35). And the language of submission in both texts is the language of the standard household code of the time – the head of the household should be able to expect other members of the household, notably his wife, to be subject/submissive to him;47 similarly children should be subject/submissive to their parents,48 and slaves to their

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masters.49 So in all likelihood, the Pauline counsel in these passages, in reference to house-churches, should be read not as church order but as household order, in a day when the household was regarded as the basic unit and building block of community in Greco-Roman society. In this context, the Pauline counsel is best taken as a way of affirming and reassuring all concerned that the early Christians did not want to be heard as challenging the pattern of household order that gave the ancient city its social stability. It has nothing to do with church order or a more general patriarchy as such. There is equal or greater angst on the subject of homosexual practice. For the Christian fundamentalist, and not only the fundamentalist, the decisive fact is that Leviticus pronounces a death sentence on homosexual practice, as also on adultery and incest (Lev. 20.10 –16), and that the apostle Paul also condemns homosexual practice (Rom. 1.26– 27; 1 Cor. 6.9). The possibility that this ruling was culturally conditioned, or that Paul was reacting against the uninhibited sexual licence of the Hellenistic world, or against pederasty in particular, is not to be considered, since it blurs what is otherwise a clear-cut ethical ruling. The fact that Christians no longer observe the practice of circumcision and animal sacrifice, even though they were equally fundamental to Israel’s religious code, provides no precedent for fundamentalist antipathy to homosexuality. Similarly, the fact that the social mores, which took slavery for granted in both Old and New Testament, have been long abandoned by Christians, cuts no ice. Here again, even to raise the possibility that this ruling is other than an absolute is to undermine the absolute, the infallible authority that the Protestant fundamentalist vests in the Bible. Equally disturbing are the consequences for the fundamentalists’ attitude to others, including other Christians. As James Barr puts it, fundamentalists ‘want to think of their own position as the or the only Christian position: there is, for them, no other truly “Christian” position that can be contrasted with their own’.50 Because they have the truth, those who disagree with them are simply wrong. When a community recognises that the truth is often multi-faceted, that the truth is bigger than particular formulations of that truth, it also recognises that the coming together of differing perceptions of truth will inevitably involve compromise. That, after all, is what politics is all about. But for fundamentalists truth is univocal, black and white, and compromise is a

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denial of truth, of the truth that they cling to as the only truth. Where one has absolutes and universals, then no compromise is possible. To recognise the validity of other opinions is to relativise truth.51 Those who disagree are blind, devious, or mistaken; and in any case they are simply wrong. ‘No compromise!’ is a typical fundamentalist slogan and war-cry. Those who appreciate the extent to which the Tea Party and evangelical fundamentalists gained control of the Republican party in the States over the past five years will not have been at all surprised at the deadlock in the US government for most of President Obama’s first term of office. The Tea Party well illustrates Karen Armstrong’s description of fundamentalism as ‘a religion of rage’.52 As the Moral Majority in the early 1980s and the Tea Party in the past decade well illustrate, a fundamentalist religious mindset is all too likely to transpose into a fundamentalist political mindset. No compromise!53 The next phase in fundamentalist attitude to the other, as again attested by the religious fundamentalism of the United States over nearly a century, is intolerance. Since those who disagree with the fundamentalist are disagreeing with the truth, they are not only wrong, but their alternative views are a threat to the truth. They cannot be tolerated. The claim to certainty, even if only in religious truth, means that those who dispute that truth are blind or willfully perverse. And even co-religionists who wish to believe and practise differently are all too readily treated as heretics or apostates to be coerced or expelled. All religious systems have a tendency in that direction. Which is why when the religious system acquires political power, then look out! American fundamentalism is by no means the only one to provide warning cases in point. The extreme phase of fundamentalist attitude to the other is the conviction that the other provides such a threat to the fundamentalist’s truth and certainty that it should be suppressed. Part of the strategy here is to demonise the opposition. Here we see the root of President Reagan’s categorisation of Russia as ‘the evil empire’, and George W. Bush’s lumping together Arab nationalist Iraq, Islamist Iran, and communist North Korea as the ‘axis of evil’. Here too we see the root of the Republican right’s dismissal of opponents as ‘not really American’, not truly ‘one of us’, or the refusal of a surprising proportion of Republicans to believe that Obama is truly an American citizen, born in America. Moreover, a typically fundamentalist view is that the opposition, the other, should not be given the privilege of free speech to spread its

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untruth. Instead the untruth should be suppressed. Preferably it should be extirpated, by violent means if necessary. Here we see the root of the policy of extraordinary rendition, whereby those suspected of dangerous untruth can be abducted and held in confinement for years without legal recourse. In the Christian West we no longer burn heretics, but we seem to think that it is somehow morally acceptable to send unmanned drones with their deadly armaments to hover over and occasionally strike at Pakistani villages, never mind the ‘collateral damage’. The point I am making, of course, is that a fundamentalist mindset, born in the southern States of America, has reached far, not only into inter-church and inter-faith relations, but also into America’s national politics and into the international politics that affect us all. In short, I cannot avoid the conclusion that the Protestant fundamentalism of The Fundamentals, with its focus on inerrancy and literal interpretation of the Bible, with its confusion of faith with certainty and with its intolerance and unwillingness to compromise, is indeed a threat in today’s world. James Barr concludes by noting ‘the frightening alienation of fundamentalism from the main stream of church life and theology’.54 But the threat that Protestant fundamentalism poses in North America goes well beyond the ecclesiastical sphere into the realms of national policy and international relations. And it is by no means the only fundamentalism that poses such a threat.

Notes 1. The best account of American Protestantism is G. M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870– 1925 (2nd edn) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); see also E. R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800 – 1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970, 2008). 2. See particularly M. E. Marty and R. S. Appleby (eds), Fundamentalisms Observed and Fundamentalisms Comprehended (The Fundamentalism Project, vols 1 and 5; University of Chicago, 1991, 1995); also H. A. Harris, ‘How helpful is the term “Fundamentalist”?’, in C. H. Partridge (ed.), Fundamentalisms (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2001), pp. 3 – 18. 3. See also H. A. Harris, ‘Protestant fundamentalism’, in Partridge (ed.), Fundamentalisms (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2001), pp. 33 – 51. 4. M. Ruthven, Fundamentalism: The Search for Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): ‘In a sense Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other Reformation leaders could be described as “fundamentalists” many centuries before the term

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

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was coined, while the Council of Trent can also be seen as a “fundamentalist” or “integralist” response’ (15). J. Barr, Fundamentalism (London: SCM Press, 1977), p. 175. Rightly noted by C. H. Partridge in his Introduction to Fundamentalisms, p. xiv. Harris, ‘How helpful’, pp. 14 – 16. K. Armstrong, The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (London: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 171. M. E. Marty, ‘What is fundamentalism? Theological perspectives’, in H. Ku¨ng and J. Moltmann (eds), Fundamentalism as an Ecumenical Challenge (Concilium Special; London: SCM Press, 1992), pp. 1–11, in an early conclusion of the multi-volume Fundamentalism Project, which he edited with R. Scott Appelby, sums up the character of fundamentalism as ‘oppositionalism’: ‘Fighting back as a constitutive principle determines the shape of fundamentalist theological methods, principles and substance, just as it does the shape of fundamentalist group formation and political strategy’ (1). See also Moltmann’s essay in the same volume (‘Fundamentalism and Modernity’, pp. 99–105). George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), characterises a fundamentalist as ‘an evangelical who is militant in opposition to liberal theology in the churches or to the changes in cultural values or mores, such as those associated with “secular humanism”’ (1). The Wikipedia article on The Fundamentals gives a full list of the volumes’ essays. See also Ruthven, Fundamentalism, pp. 10 – 13. A. Vermeersch, ‘Modernism’, The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 10 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911) – available at www.newadvent.org/ cathen/10415a.htm (accessed 30 March 2015). For a fuller account, see Armstrong, Battle for God, pp. 175–8. See further Barr, Fundamentalism, Chapter 8. Barr, Fundamentalism, p. 163. ‘Fundamentalists assume the need for a firm rational or empirical foundation upon which to rest faith, and on which to build up the doctrines of their belief system. They take the Bible to be that foundation. Their apologetic stance, therefore, is that we must know that the Bible is true before we can go on to say anything else concerning God. Without a reliable Bible, they fear either that we cannot get started in faith, or that our faith must surely collapse’ (Harris, ‘Protestant Fundamentalism’, p. 39). See H. Ku¨ng, Infallible? (London: Collins, 1971), pp. 81 – 2. A complaint voiced by J. I. Packer in his preface to J. M. Boice, Does Inerrancy Matter? (International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, 1977). See also Packer’s earlier defence of fundamentalism – ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God (London: Inter-Varsity Fellowship, 1958) particularly pp. 94 – 101. Boice, Does Inerrancy Matter? pp. 8, 20. ‘The inerrancy of the Bible, the entire Bible including its details, is indeed the constant principle of rationality within fundamentalism’ (Barr, Fundamentalism, p. 53). The claim to inerrancy refers only to the original autographs; see e.g. R. Nicole, ‘The nature of inerrancy’, in R. Nicole and J. R. Michaels (eds), Inerrancy and

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

FUNDAMENTALISMS Common Sense (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980), pp. 71 – 95: inerrancy means ‘that at no point in what was originally given were the biblical writers allowed to make statements or endorse viewpoints which are not in conformity with objective truth’ (88). And further N. L. Geisler (ed.), Inerrancy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979). P. J. Toner, ‘Infallibility’, The Catholic Encyclopedia. G. Dollar, History of Fundamentalism in America: ‘Historic fundamentalism is the literal exposition of all the affirmation and attitudes of the Bible’ (quoted by Ruthven, Fundamentalism, p. 59). Packer, ‘Fundamentalism’, pp. 102– 6. See e.g. W. G. Ku¨mmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of its Problems (London: SCM Press, 1972), p. 23. Matt. 20.29– 34 (two, exiting); Mark 10.46 –52 (one, exiting); Luke 18.35– 43 (one, entering). See e.g. E. J. Young, Thy Word is Truth: Thoughts on the Biblical Doctrine of Inspiration (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957). See also Barr, Fundamentalism, p. 37. Nicely illustrated by Harris, ‘Protestant fundamentalism’, p. 40. Boice, Does Inerrancy Matter?, p. 11. As Barr points out, ‘the point of conflict between fundamentalists and others is not over literality but over inerrancy’. The Bible ‘must be so interpreted as to avoid any admission that it contains any kind of error’ (Fundamentalism, pp. 40, 46). Boice, Does Inerrancy Matter?, p. 13 The idea of the ‘rapture’ is drawn from 1 Thess. 4.13 – 17, where it appears in reference to the coming again of Christ and the final resurrection of the dead; but in rapture theology it is integrated with the different scheme of Revelation. Armstrong describes the belief as ‘a fantasy of revenge: the elect imagined themselves gazing down upon the sufferings of those who had jeered at their beliefs, ignored, ridiculed, and marginalized their faith, and now, too late, realized their error’ (Battle for God, pp. 138– 9). Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970. See further Barr, Fundamentalism, pp. 190– 207; Armstrong, Battle for God, pp. 217– 8 (quotation from p. 217); C. Chapman, ‘The Israeli-Palestinian conflict: A case study in the clash of fundamentalisms’, in Partridge (ed.), Fundamentalisms, pp. 279– 99, especially pp. 293– 4. Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1995– 2007. Classically illustrated in one of the foundation documents of Protestant fundamentalism – A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, Inspiration (1881; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979). Matt. 21.12 – 13; Mark 11.15 –17; Luke 19.45 – 46; John 2.13 –17. Matt. 26.58, 69 – 75; Mark 14.54, 66 – 72; Luke 22.54 – 62; John 18.15 – 18, 25 – 27. H. Lindsell, The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976), pp. 175–6.

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38. See further Barr, Fundamentalism, pp. 55 – 72. 39. See also Barr, Fundamentalism, pp. 68 – 9. Armstrong notes that the psychologist J. H. Leuba in his book Belief in God and Immortality (1921) ‘produced statistics that “proved” that a college education endangered religious belief’ (Battle for God, p. 175). See also her description of the Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina (p. 215). 40. See P. Hebblethwaite, ‘A fundamentalist Pope?’, in Ku¨ng and Moltmann (eds), Fundamentalism, pp. 80 – 8. 41. Packer, ‘Fundamentalism’: ‘This is what evangelicals are concerned above all to maintain’ (p. 73); ‘To learn the mind of God, one must consult His written Word’ (p. 47). 42. Armstrong, Battle for God, pp. 140– 1. 43. J. H. Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865), pp. 307, 318. 44. L. E. Keck, A Future for the Historical Jesus (Nashville: Abingdon, 1971), pp. 55 – 6, 57 – 8. 45. R. Holloway, Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2012), p. 184. 46. Ruthven, Fundamentalism, pp. 103– 4, 113– 4; see also G. McCulloch, ‘Women and fundamentalisms’, in Partridge (ed.), Fundamentalisms, pp. 202– 19. 47. Col. 3.18; Eph. 5.22; Tit. 2.5; 1 Pet. 3.1, 5. 48. Luke 2.51; see Col. 3.20; Eph. 6.1. 49. Tit. 2.9; 1 Pet. 2.18; see Col. 3.22; Eph. 6.5. 50. Barr, Fundamentalism, pp. 4, 14 – 15 51. Ruthven, Fundamentalism, pp. 44 – 9. 52. Armstrong, Battle for God, p. 216. 53. See further Armstrong, Battle for God, pp. 309– 16, on the Moral Majority. As she notes, ‘a religious vision which sees certain principles as inviolable, and, therefore, nonnegotiable’ will always find compromise difficult (p. 316). In November 2011 the New York Times quoted Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, speculating that the Tea Party position in Congress was perceived as ‘too extreme and not willing to compromise’ (Wikipedia, ‘Tea Party Movement’). 54. Barr, Fundamentalism, p. 338.

Bibliography Armstrong, K., The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (London: HarperCollins, 2000). Bainbridge, W. S., The Sociology of Religious Movements (New York: Routledge, 1997). Barr, J., Fundamentalism (London: SCM Press, 1977). Boice, J. M., Does Inerrancy Matter? (Chicago, IL: International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, 1977). Chapman, C., ‘The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A case study in the clash of fundamentalisms’, in C. H. Partridge (ed.), Fundamentalisms (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2001).

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Geisler, N. L. (ed.), Inerrancy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979). Harris, H. A., ‘How helpful is the term “Fundamentalist”?’, in C. H. Partridge (ed.), Fundamentalisms (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2001). Hebblethwaite, P., ‘A fundamentalist Pope?’, in H. Ku¨ng and J. Moltmann (eds), Fundamentalism as an Ecumenical Challenge (London: SCM Press, 1992). Holloway, R., Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2012). Keck, L. E., A Future for the Historical Jesus (Nashville: Abingdon, 1971). Ku¨mmel, W. G., The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of its Problems (London: SCM Press, 1972). Ku¨ng, H., Infallible? (London: Collins, 1971). Lindsell, H., The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976). Marsden, G. M., Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870 –1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Marty, M. E., ‘What is fundamentalism? Theological perspectives’, in H. Ku¨ng and J. Moltmann (eds), Fundamentalism as an Ecumenical Challenge (London: SCM Press, 1992). Marty, M. E. and R. S. Appleby (eds), Fundamentalisms Observed and Fundamentalisms Comprehended (Chicago: The Fundamentalism Project, vols. 1 and 5; University of Chicago, 1991, 1995). Marsden, G., Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991). Nicole, R., ‘The nature of inerrancy’, in R. Nicole and J. R. Michaels (eds), Inerrancy and Common Sense (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980). Ruthven, M., Fundamentalism: The Search for Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University, 2009). Sandeen, E. R., The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800– 1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago: 1970, 2008). Young, E. G., Thy Word is Truth: Thoughts on the Biblical Doctrine of Inspiration (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957).

CHAPTER 2 EXPLORING THE FUNDAMENTALIST MINDSET: THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGIST'S VIEWPOINT Peter Herriot

Sociological Definition, Psychological Questions In his account of the history of the term ‘fundamentalism’ in the previous chapter, James Dunn has described some of the cultural features of the American Protestants who first used the term to describe their religious position. It was entirely appropriate that sociologists should subsequently continue to use the term to denote a category of religious movements. For the culture of these Americans of the early twentieth century – their beliefs, values, and norms of behaviour – contained many of the features that differentiate fundamentalisms from other categories of religious movement. So what are these differentiating features, and how do they affect the overall posture of fundamentalist movements towards the outside world? Various research projects, at least one of them global in scope,1 have achieved a reasonable consensus regarding their identity. They are five in number. First, and most basically, fundamentalists are reactionary. They are reacting against the perceived marginalisation of their form of religion in the modern and late-modern world. They are particularly hostile to those elements of modernity that we associate with the

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Enlightenment, such as human and minority rights, human agency, cultural relativism, and so on. Secularisation, the process of the differentiating out of social systems, which had previously come under the purview of religion, and of the consequent increasing power of these systems2 is another favourite target. Hence fundamentalism is, by definition, a modern phenomenon, since it is reacting against certain aspects of modernity. Bolstering this reactionary stance is a second distinctive feature, a preference for moral and conceptual dualism. Actions are either sinful or holy, inspired either by Satan or by God. Persons are either saved or lost, faithful or infidel. Beliefs are either true or false, sound or unsound, and this present sinful and carnal world is contrasted with the glorious spiritual world to come. This contrast introduces a third element, an apocalyptic vision of the millennial rule of God. Some fundamentalists are willing to leave the achievement of his ultimate rule on earth to God alone, while others believe they have his mandate to hasten its arrival by their own efforts. In both cases, the vision involves a scenario in which either the faithful survive while all others are lost, or else they rule the world on God’s behalf. Fourth, fundamentalists, or at least those from the three great ‘religions of the book’, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, believe that their holy book is the word of God. It comes directly to them from the Almighty, through the medium of the Prophet, or the Old and New Testament authors. It provides all they need to know about belief and practice, and all other sources must be evaluated as to their truth and value in terms of their compatibility with its precepts. However, finally, their interpretations of their holy book are selective. They derive from it a perception of God as holy and given to visiting retributive justice on his enemies, while favouring the faithful, that is themselves. These beliefs and assumptions necessarily and consistently carry through to the values and actions by which fundamentalists engage with other social movements and systems. Fundamentalisms are usually oppositional and hostile in their stance, frequently claiming that they are the victims of persecution. They sharply distinguish their boundaries, differentiating themselves clearly from other movements and maintaining a high degree of uniformity within their own culture. They tend to be led by powerful and charismatic leaders who

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nevertheless continue to demonstrate the prototypical characteristics of the ideal adherent.3 And they have strict norms of behaviour to which adherents are expected to conform. These distinctive features of fundamentalism have been demonstrated across different religions, and by a variety of researchers. Whether or not a particular movement falls into the category is a matter for dispute on occasion, as is the question of whether it is primarily religious or nationalist in its basic aim (for example, in Northern Ireland and India). But overall, sociologists have been successful in persuading most scholars of religion that it is legitimate to use the term ‘fundamentalist’, and that its degeneration into a term of abuse in the popular media is no reason for abandoning its use in serious discourse. Indeed, the discipline of sociology has contributed immensely to our understanding of fundamentalisms. For, in addition to defining them as a category of social system, it has also directed our attention to the importance of their historical, cultural, social, and political contexts. It is impossible, for example, to understand Protestant fundamentalisms in the United States without appreciating the lasting influence of the Puritan founding fathers.4 Radical Islam makes little sense without the Middle Eastern history of empire and nationalism.5 And such Jewish fundamentalisms as Gush Emunim are embedded in the nationalist and messianic culture of Israel.6 However, there are questions which sociologists, historians, and political scientists fail to address, perfectly reasonably since they are psychological in nature. The most frequently asked psychological question is: ‘What are the psychological characteristics which predispose people to be fundamentalists?’ Much research effort has been directed at this question, but with minimal success.7 None of the five basic personality factors (extraversion/introversion, neuroticism/stability, conscientiousness, friendliness/hostility, and openness)8 predict fundamentalist belief, and the only characteristic that has been shown to be reliably associated with fundamentalism is authoritarianism.9 Authoritarianism has three factors: respect for authority, hostility to outgroups, and conservative hostility to change.10 Perhaps, in the light of this overall failure of research, we may conclude that the question being asked is inappropriate. It is based on the North American emphasis on psychological differences as predictors of behaviour, and concentrates upon the psychology of the individual.

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A question that takes more account of the social context emphasised by sociologists runs as follows: ‘How do fundamentalist movements motivate ordinary people to believe and do extraordinary things?’ Of course, this question begs others: how can we say, for example, that they are ‘ordinary’ people, and that their beliefs and actions are ‘extraordinary’. The general failure of the psychology of individual differences to find differences that predict fundamentalism justifies the use of ‘ordinary’. And the sociological definition of fundamentalisms as reactionary, and therefore counter-cultural, permits that of ‘extraordinary’. This second question addresses issues regarding the relationship between fundamentalisms and their adherents (i.e. between social systems and their members), rather than questions of individual psychology. It is therefore appropriately answered using social psychological assumptions and theories.11

Social Identity Theory Various theoretical areas have some explanatory power when we seek to understand the relationship between fundamentalisms and their adherents in a global context. For example, the areas of conformity and group influence; labelling, stereotypes and social judgement; and values and attitudes, all have obvious applications. However, easily the most promising is the classic social psychological theory of social identity,12 on which I will concentrate. Social identities may be defined as ‘categories of person to which individuals believe they belong, and which they have internalised as part of their self-concept’. This definition needs unpacking. First, it implies that we have multiple social identities, since we all believe ourselves to belong to at least several different categories. This multiplicity does not imply ‘schizophrenic’ confusion, however, but rather, the capacity to negotiate different social situations successfully as we access the appropriate social identity for each.13 Once accessed in the mind, an identity will direct socially appropriate behaviour. Second, the identity categories are not necessarily face-to-face groups of people, the members of whom can in principle be identified, for example the congregation of the local mosque. Rather, many categories are more abstract and general: for example, ‘the Umma’,14 or ‘Bible believers’.15 The fact that a category is conceptual in this way does not, however, imply that it does not guide

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one’s actions. If one perceives a social situation as where one’s fundamentalist faith is relevant, then the identity, for example Bible believer, will provide a range of approved behaviours. The most important element of the definition, however, is that the categories are internalised into the self, becoming elements of the selfconcept.16 Hence a perceived threat to the Umma or to Bible believers becomes a threat to me, personally. If the Umma is persecuted anywhere in the world, then I suffer with them. If they win an occasional triumph against the forces of godless secularism, then the triumph is mine. Or rather, it is not only mine but ours, in the continuous struggle between us and them. Moreover, when a social category is internalised and becomes a social identity, it brings with it its culture.17 Its beliefs, values, and normative behaviours are all internalised too, providing resources for making sense of the social world and for acting within it. However, most people now have a wide range of social identities, living as they do in modernising or late-modern societies, where the basic social systems have become highly differentiated: the worlds of work, family, government, the arts, science, and religion, for example. The fundamental issue then arises: what happens when the cultures of one’s different social identities are mutually incompatible? Many modern people seek to retain a degree of internal consistency, so that they maintain some sort of core individual identity, although simply playing the appropriate role is always an alienating option. Another solution, however, is to allocate a dominant position to one particular social identity, for example a fundamentalist one, so that it is salient in many and varied situations.18 A committed ‘Bible believer’ may treat a social party or a work conference as an opportunity for evangelism, while for a militant ‘defender of the Umma’, every contact with secular authority may become conflictual. If one’s worldview consists of a simple ‘us versus everyone else’ distinction (the Islamic vanguard versus jahili society, for example,19 or ‘the saved versus the unsaved’20), then every social situation will be interpreted in these binary terms. Other basic aspects of social identity theory demonstrate its applicability in principle to an understanding of the relationship between fundamentalist movements and their adherents. The first of these is the distinction between social identity and personal identity.21 One’s personal identity is one’s conception of oneself as a unique

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individual, and a common value in late-modern societies is that it should be ‘authentic’. Individualism is a powerful social trend in late-modern societies,22 and hence personal identity often plays a prominent role within the self-concept of members of such societies. Thus the dominance of their particular social identity in the self-concepts of fundamentalists is counter-cultural within ‘Western’ societies. However, in more collectivist societies,23 it is less so. As a caveat, we should note the artificiality of this distinction between social and personal identity. For example, one may be a unique individual because of one’s unique set of social identities. There are several different relationships suggested in social identity theory between social identities within the self.24 Some identities, for example, are nested. The super-ordinate category of Bible believer may subsume an identity as a Southern Baptist, which in its turn subsumes membership of South Fork mega-church, within which one may be a member of the men’s Bible study group. All of these lower-order, nested, identities reinforce the culture of the fundamentalist movement, while adding some additional beliefs, values, and behavioural norms that are, nevertheless, consonant with it. Movement, denomination, congregation, and small group are thus organised in such a way as to reinforce the movement’s social identity. However, the possibility of subordinate identities becoming more central to adherents’ selves than the movement identity may prevent the movement from mobilising successfully when it wishes to. There is always likely to be a distinction between immediate local and face-to-face identities, such as the congregation and its groups, and the much more abstract and ideological movement identity. Perhaps the most significant social unit in American Protestantism currently is neither movement nor denomination, but rather the local mega-church. Other significant relationships between identities are those of dominance and salience, which I have already touched upon above. Dominance refers to the centrality to, and importance of, a particular social identity to the self-concept, while salience concerns the identity that becomes uppermost in the individual’s mind in a particular social situation. Clearly, for some people it is primarily the situation that predicts the salience of an identity, whereas for others, including fundamentalists, the dominance of one identity renders that identity salient in a wide variety of situations.

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Motivation, Differentiation, and Conformity At this point we need to ask a more basic psychological question: why are their social identities important to people at all? What are their motives for incorporating a social category with all its attendant baggage into their idea of who they are? Why can they not just ‘be themselves’? And why, in particular, would they want to take on board such a frequently counter-cultural and unpopular identity as a fundamentalist one? The answers are several, but probably the most powerful motive is the reduction of uncertainty which fundamentalist adherence provides.25 The late-modern world is full of perceived uncertainties, despite our emphasis on seeking to control risk.26 People are uncertain about the survival of patriarchy, the threat to their national culture of immigrant cultures, their social status and living standards in a world of ‘flexible’ employment, and the very survival of their religion in a secular world. Their social identity as a fundamentalist gives them a black and white worldview with a clear conception of their own position and status within it. It tells them what they should believe and how they should behave. And it assures them of their future survival and victory in the cosmic war of which they are part: certainty in an uncertain world. A second powerful motivation to be a fundamentalist relates to selfesteem.27 If I know that I am one of God’s chosen few, fighting for his truth against this evil world, then I have a role in life and a part to play in cosmic history. The fact that the world mocks and derides me is only evidence that I am correct in this belief.28 I may be a fool in the eyes of others, and a nobody in terms of the ungodly values of this sinful age, but in God’s eyes, and in those of his true servants, I am a person of importance. And a final powerful motivation is that of affiliation.29 I am accepted and affirmed by others like myself, and have a powerful sense of ‘us’, of belonging, not just to my local congregation but to a great and growing movement. So how do fundamentalist social identities actually work? How do the leaders of fundamentalisms ensure that their adherents develop and maintain a powerful movement social identity that can motivate them to sacrificial commitment of time and money?30 Their key strategy is to differentiate the movement as clearly as possible from all other social movements;31 and to ensure that the movement’s culture remains homogeneous.32 In other words, it is to make the movement as different

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as possible from the outside world, but as homogeneous as possible within the fortress. By these means, adherents can develop an identity which is sharply distinct from other identities, with clear boundary lines drawn.33 They can be clear who they are not, and therefore by implication who they are; and they can also be clear who they are because of the general conformity of fellow adherents to the movement culture. Such visible conformity gives a clear message as to which beliefs, values, and behaviour are expected of any adherent. Obvious signals such as dress codes (e.g. the niqab) are interspersed with an emphasis on correct doctrine (e.g. Calvinist predestination). This need to sharply differentiate the movement, and therefore its social identity, is evident from the tendency of fundamentalist leaders to criticise most strongly those movements most similar to their own. Calvinist Bible believers, for example, are vocal critics of charismatic Christians who are actually, like them, theologically positioned on the Evangelical wing of the church.34 For it is most important to distinguish oneself from those with whom one might most easily be confused. Specific psychological processes are involved in firming up the opposition of us versus them, the in-group versus the out-groups. To ensure that adherents know what is expected of them, leaders embody in their person, and model by their actions, the prototype of the ideal adherent. Sayeed Qutb, hallowed radical Islamist prophet, humbly accepted imprisonment and martyrdom at the hands of the infidel. Phillip Jensen, Calvinist Sydney Anglican, rejects ritual and church hierarchy, and criticises the Anglican Church, charismatic believers, other religions, and secular Australian society. A prototype simply exemplifies the model social identity; it carries no hint of personal identity or individual difference. The fundamentalist social identity is what matters, not authentic individualism. A similar process of depersonalisation is evident in stereotyping,35 where movement leaders and members describe members of particular out-groups as all demonstrating the same set of (unfavourable) characteristics. Individual people become nothing more than instances of a category; personal identities become submerged under a single overwhelming social category. Prototyping and stereotyping thus result in the mutual perception of two depersonalised categories of person. This is an ideal scenario for inter-group conflict,36 for ingroup members simply elicit the behaviour only to be expected from

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the out-group, who usually oblige by exhibiting it. Conflict becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Narratives and Emotions The theoretical account hitherto sounds remarkably cerebral, however. Ideas of categories and identities, of prototypes and stereotypes, are primarily cognitive, even though hints of emotions such as triumph and pride, fear and anger, have appeared when the self has been boosted or threatened by movement triumphs or persecution. Where, we may ask, is the ‘fire in the belly’, characteristic of so many fundamentalists, to be found? How are their emotions stirred sufficiently to inspire their typical sacrificial expenditure of time, energy, money, and general commitment to the cause?37 A major source of motivation are the narrative stories that leaders tell and adherents internalise as their own. Such narratives are not primarily theological, since they are not constructed in the form of a rational and structured argument. Nor, however, are they personal stories, telling the individual adherent’s own unique history. Rather, they are somewhere in between these two forms: a story for all. Their purposes are to firm up the adherents’ social identity, and to enhance conformity and commitment by providing a clear worldview and a location for the adherents within that world. Typically, the worldview is of a cosmic struggle between God and Satan, while each adherent is a soldier in God’s army, fighting and ultimately overcoming a variety of Satanic foes. Powerful symbols and themes of human experience permeate the narrative, and as a consequence it arouses powerful and motivational emotions. Pride and self-esteem are enhanced by one’s status as God’s soldier in the cosmic spiritual war, fear and anger are aroused by the wiles of Satan, and contempt and loathing are generated for those on ‘the other side’. The following is an attempt to encapsulate one fundamentalist narrative, which I have composed38 on the basis of a study of American Protestant fundamentalist websites. There once was a golden age, when godly men ruled the world on God’s behalf. This original golden age has occasionally been reborn in the course of human history, notably at the time of the Reformation in Calvin’s Geneva, the Puritan settlements in

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America, and the later Great Awakening. We are the true inheritors of this tradition, God’s persecuted but faithful remnant, who keep alive the true faith and the vision of a Christian America by struggling with his foes, who would extinguish this precious flame. The enemy, Satan the Prince of Darkness, takes on many forms. He even disguises himself as Christ’s Church, compromising with the secular world and choosing which parts of God’s Word it finds it convenient to obey. Or else he works conspiratorially, forming networks of global power such as the New World Order, or taking over the cultural establishment so as to advance the cause of secular humanism. Sometimes, though, Satan is only too obvious. Some people don’t hide their disgusting sexual perversions behind closed doors, but parade them in full view. They are blatantly challenging God’s Word. Women fail to take their God-given role within the family. They even destroy God’s gift of a child to fulfil their selfish desires. The Bible gives us a blue-print of a godly family, which secular humanists are trying to destroy. Instead, they want to ensure that gays, feminists, and abortionists have the same ‘rights’ as other Americans. Work-shy layabouts, single mothers, and even Muslim extremists get priority over hard-working Americans, though they are savagely persecuting Christian people abroad. We, God’s chosen covenant people, are at war on his behalf with these his enemies. We obey God’s laws, as promulgated in his infallible Word the Bible, and especially in the Old Testament. We hold a Biblical worldview, for God’s Word is all we need for guidance in what we should believe and how we should act. God’s enemies are in open rebellion against him, holding an ungodly worldview. They deny that he created the world, and, more generally, they deliberately disobey his laws and persecute his people. In this titanic struggle between God’s people and the evil world, our strategy is not to sit back and wait for Christ’s return; nor is it merely self-defence, fighting to save the faithful remnant. Rather, we must carry the fight to the enemy. Since this is war, we must win these battles using all the means God supplies. We must ally with any who share God’s worldview.

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The world’s rules can, however, sometimes be useful, as when we win properly democratic elections by using our superior organisation and resources. We are, after all, true Americans, not Islamic revolutionaries. Over the longer term, we must infiltrate and take over the so-called Christian denominations. We must reclaim America, his redeemer nation, for God, and ultimately reconstruct all the world’s institutions, so that they all obey God’s laws, as our forefathers did. Christ already rules, but he depends upon us to reclaim his kingdom on earth. Then he will reign for the millennium dispensing biblical justice, administered on his behalf by us his faithful people. The great cosmic struggle of good versus evil, truth versus error, God versus Satan, will have been won once and for all. We will be vindicated at last. This narrative is designed to arouse emotions and motivate for action. It highlights the threats to the fundamentalist identity, thereby eliciting fear and anger. It scapegoats specific out-groups, evoking contempt and disgust. It offers the prospect of power and glory, giving hope and ambition. And it provides a unique and privileged identity, a source of security and pride. Such narratives may sound ridiculous to many; but they are capable of eliciting powerful emotions and committed actions. It is hardly surprising that these are sometimes violent in nature.39

A ‘Threat to the Modern World’? So perhaps a perspective from social psychology sheds some light on the relatively unexplored relationship between fundamentalist movements and their adherents, and its implications for social conflict. However, the title of this volume poses a far more demanding question: Is fundamentalism a threat to the modern world? For the purposes of this chapter, I will sketch a particular worldview, since it is impossible to address the question without first providing an account of what is meant by the phrase ‘the modern world’. Then the task becomes one of applying a social psychological perspective on fundamentalisms to ‘the modern world’. It is a truism to say that the context of religious fundamentalisms is the globalising world. However, the full implications of this truism have

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only recently begun to be explored. The key element of globalisation is the vast recent increase in connectivity.40 The capability of making a social connection with anyone anywhere ensures that there are few limits to the free transmission of ideas and information. The increased mobility of labour and of capital likewise results in hitherto relatively self-contained cultures impinging upon others. The consequence of all this connectivity is a growing perception of the world as a single social system. While the majority of theorists and commentators have emphasised objective indices of globalisation, especially of the global reach of capital and of corporations, subjective perceptions are also of profound importance.41 In particular, the general perception of the existence of a global social system directs attention towards such areas as universal human rights, ethical principles, and theories of justice.42 It also permits the imagination of a common global fate. The consequences of this global perspective are that at least two problems are widely recognised as urgent global issues. They are, first, the current growth of inequalities within and between nation states; and second, the threats posed by climate change and population growth to the availability of the resources necessary for a life worth living.43 Such global issues can only be addressed by society at the global level. The differentiation of functions that is the essence of modern society suggests that global society can only function effectively as a set of global sub-systems.44 Any solution to its pressing existential issues is therefore dependent on the collaboration of global sub-systems, which will each have to learn to appreciate the potential contributions of the others. Among these is the global sub-system of religion, which could contribute its appreciation of the transcendent, its powerful symbols and rituals, and its ethical imperatives. Such ‘soft power’ is at a premium in the late-modern world. Collaboration on the part of religion would require a degree of integration with other global sub-systems, which is not commonly found. The form of integration required would not be structural but, rather, collaborative and dialogical. However, the degree of integration that would be necessary is more typically counteracted by religion’s tendency towards the opposite pole of the dialectic, differentiation. Of course, a certain degree of differentiation is required for collaboration, otherwise religion would have no distinctive contribution to make. But at the very least, different religions would have to act together in an

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integrated and collaborative way to contribute at the global level. Furthermore, they would have to engage in dialogue with some other sub-systems with which they may have hitherto had an uneasy relationship, for example business, government, and science. The essence of fundamentalisms, however, is their insistence on differentiating themselves from others. They only establish their dominant social identity and their power to mobilise and motivate by opposing other movements and institutions of their own religion, other religions, and the other social systems of ‘this evil world’. Hence their stance is in principle inimical to any attempt by global society to save humankind from itself, which requires a degree of integration and collaboration of which fundamentalisms are by their very nature incapable. Furthermore, by their oppositional programmes, fundamentalisms occupy the time, energy, and resources of the religious institutions which they are attacking. They are thereby incurring opportunity costs, in that they are preventing religion from contributing as fully as it might to the global project. They also present an image of religion that its enemies in other sub-systems are only too eager to exploit.45 In this sense, therefore, fundamentalisms are indeed a threat to today’s world. Perhaps more attention should be paid to this longer term and more indirect threat than to any more immediate concerns regarding security. Are there any aspects of the social psychological analysis in terms of social identity that might help to mitigate this threat? In essence, I have argued, fundamentalisms are oppositional; they define their own powerful and dominant social identity in terms of their out-groups. However, their second source of identity is their strong internal group culture. As I have suggested, as well as enforcing conformity to this culture, fundamentalist leaders have the capacity to change it, provided that they do not themselves stray too far from the movement prototype. Indeed, fundamentalisms have survived and adapted to new contexts only as a result of innovative leadership.46 Hence if any persuasive leverage is to be had, it is upon leaders. Unfortunately, it is of the essence of sectarian movements that any perceived falling away from purity of doctrine or practice is punished by the jettisoning of the leadership or the formation of breakaway sects.47 Nevertheless, the attempt may be worth making to incorporate fundamentalist leaders. Such a strategy is infinitely preferable to fighting them, since opposition is their lifeblood, and persecution their talisman.

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Ultimately, however, we have to remind ourselves of why fundamentalisms continue to survive and flourish. It is because they meet human needs for certainty, self-esteem, and affiliation. It is only when we address the causes of uncertainty, low self-esteem, and isolation, causes such as inequality, poverty and injustice, that fundamentalisms will lose their attraction. And religion can play a vital role in such an enterprise.

Notes 1. G. A. Almond, S. R. Appleby and E. Sivan, Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms Around the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 2. J. Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 3. J. C. Turner and S. A. Haslam, ‘Social identity, organisations, and leadership’, in M. E. Turner (ed.) Groups at Work: Advances in Theory and Research, Vol. 2 (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 2000). 4. K. Armstrong, The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (London: HarperCollins, 2000). 5. G. Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 6. B. B. Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989). 7. B. Spilka, R. W. Hood, B. Hunsberger and R. Gorsuch, The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach (3rd edn) (New York: Guilford, 2003). 8. J. M. Digman, ‘Personality structure: Emergence of the five-factor model’, Annual Review of Psychology 41: 417– 40 (1990). 9. R. Altemeyer and B. Hunsberger, ‘Authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, quest, and prejudice’, International Journal of the Psychology of Religion 2/2: 113– 33 (1992). 10. R. Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Spectre (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 11. P. Herriot, Religious Fundamentalism: Global, Local, and Personal (London: Routledge, 2009). 12. M. A. Hogg and D. Abrams, ‘Intergroup behaviour and social identity’, in M. A. Hogg and J. Cooper (eds), Handbook of Social Psychology (London: Sage, 2003). 13. S. C. Wright, ‘Cross-group contact effects’, in S. Otten, K. Sassenberg and T. Kessler (eds), Intergroup Relations: The Role of Motivation and Emotion (Hove: Psychology Press, 2009). 14. A. Wheatcroft, Infidels: A History of the Conflict between Christendom and Islam (London: Penguin, 2004).

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15. M. Porter, Sydney Anglicans and the Threat to World Anglicanism: The Sydney Experiment (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 16. J. C. Turner, ‘Social categorisation and the self-concept: A social-cognitive theory of group behaviour’, in Edward J. Lawler (ed.), Advances in Group Processes: Theory and Research (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1985). 17. M. Schaller and C. S. Crandall (eds), The Psychological Foundations of Culture (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004). 18. J. C. Turner, ‘Towards a cognitive redefinition of the social group’, in H. Tajfel (ed.), Social Identity and Intergroup Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 19. S. Qutb, Milestones along the Way (New Delhi: Islamic Book Service, 1981). 20. M. Lienesch, Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 21. R. Jenkins, Social Identity (3rd edn) (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008). 22. A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 23. H. C. Triandis, Individualism and Collectivism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995). 24. R. J. Crisp and M. Hewstone (eds), Multiple Social Categorisation: Processes, Models, and Applications (Hove: Psychology Press, 2006). 25. M. A. Hogg and B. Mullen, ‘Joining groups to reduce uncertainty: Subjective uncertainty reduction and group identification’, in D. Abrams and M. A. Hogg (eds), Social Identity and Social Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). 26. U. Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). 27. H. Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 28. L. Festinger, H. W. Riecken and S. Schachter, When Prophecy Fails (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956). 29. R. A. Hinde, Relationships: A Dialectical Perspective (Hove: Psychology Press, 1997). 30. L. R. Iannacone, ‘Why strict churches are strong’, American Journal of Sociology 99/5: 1180– 1211 (1994). 31. M. B. Brewer, ‘The role of distinctiveness in social identity and group behaviour’, in M. A. Hogg and D. Abrams (eds), Group Motivation: Social Psychological Perspectives (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). 32. R. W. Hood, P. C. Hill and P. W. Williamson, The Psychology of Religious Fundamentalism (New York: Guilford, 2005). 33. M. A. Hogg and M. J. ‘Self-concept threat and multiple categorisation within groups’, in R. J. Crisp and M. Hewstone (eds), Multiple Social Categorisation: Processes, Models, and Applications (Hove: Psychology Press, 2006). 34. C. McGillion, The Chosen Ones: The Politics of Salvation in the Anglican Church (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2005). 35. K. A. Quinn, C. N. Macrae and G. V. Bodenhausen, ‘Stereotyping and impression formation: How categorical thinking shapes person perception’,

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36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

FUNDAMENTALISMS in M. A. Hogg and J. Cooper (eds), Handbook of Social Psychology (London: Sage, 2003). R. Brown, Group Processes: Dynamics within and between Groups (2nd edn) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Lienesch, Redeeming America. P. Herriot, The Poisonwood Paradox: Why Christianity Succeeds Locally but Fails Globally (Kindle Direct). M. Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (3rd edn) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). J. A. Scholte, Globalisation: A Critical Introduction (2nd edn) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). R. Robertson, Globalisation: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992). J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). M. Kaldor, Human Security (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). P. Beyer, Religions in Global Society (London: Routledge, 2006). R. Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006). S. F. Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). W. S. Bainbridge, The Sociology of Religious Movements (New York: Routledge, 1997).

Bibliography Almond, G A., R. S. Appleby and E. Sivan, Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Altemeyer, R., The Authoritarian Spectre (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Armstrong, K., The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (London: HarperCollins, 2000). Beck, U., World Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). Beyer, P., Religions in Global Society (London: Routledge, 2006). Brewer, M. B., ‘The role of distinctiveness in social identity and group behaviour’, in M.A. Hogg and D. Abrams (eds), Group Motivation: Social Psychological Perspectives (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). Brown, R., Group Processes: Dynamics Within and Between Groups (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Casanova, J., Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Crisp, R. J. and M. Hewstone (eds), Multiple Social Categorisation: Processes, Models, and Applications (Hove: Psychology Press, 2006). Dawkins, R., The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006). Festinger, L., H. W. Riecken and S. Schachter When Prophecy Fails (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956).

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Giddens, A., Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). Harding, S. F., The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Herriot, P., Religious Fundamentalism: Global, Local, and Personal (London: Routledge, 2009). —— The Poisonwood Paradox: Why Christianity Succeeds Locally but Fails Globally (Kindle Direct, 2012). Hinde, R. A., Relationships: A Dialectical Perspective (Hove: Psychology Press, 1997). Hood, R. W., P. C. Hill and P. W. Williamson, The Psychology of Religious Fundamentalism (New York: Guilford, 2005). Hogg, M. A. and M. J. Hornsey, ‘Self-concept threat and multiple categorisation within groups’, in R. J. Crisp and M. Hewstone (eds), Multiple Social Categorisation: Processes, Models, and Applications (Hove: Psychology Press, 2006). Hogg, M. A. and B. Mullen, ‘Joining groups to reduce uncertainty: Subjective uncertainty reduction and group identification’, in D. Abrams and M. A. Hogg (eds), Social Identity and Social Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009). Hogg, M. A. and D. Abrams, ‘Intergroup behaviour and social identity’, in M. A. Hogg and J. Cooper (eds), Handbook of Social Psychology (London: Sage, 2003). Jenkins, R., Social Identity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008). Juergensmeyer, M., Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2000). Kaldor, M., Human Security (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). Kepel, G. , The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Lawrence, B. B., Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989). Lienesch, M., Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). McGillion, C., The Chosen Ones: The Politics of Salvation in the Anglican Church (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2005). Porter, M., Sydney Anglicans and the Threat to World Anglicanism: The Sydney Experiment (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). Quinn, K. A., C. N. Macrae and G. V. Bodenhausen, ‘Stereotyping and impression formation: How categorical thinking shapes person perception’, in M. A. Hogg and J. Cooper (eds), Handbook of Social Psychology (London: Sage, 2003). Qutb, S., Milestones along the Way (New Delhi: Islamic Book Service, 1981). Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Robertson, R., Globalisation: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992). Scholte, J. A., Globalisation: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Spilka, B., R. W. Hood, B. Hunsberger and R. Gorsuch, The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach (New York: Guilford, 2003). Tajfel, H., Human Groups and Social Categories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Triandis, H. C., Individualism and Collectivism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).

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Turner, J. C., ‘Towards a cognitive redefinition of the social group’, in H. Tajfel (ed.), Social Identity and Intergroup Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Turner, J. C., ‘Social categorisation and the self-concept: A social-cognitive theory of group behaviour’, in E. J. Lawler (ed.), Advances in Group Processes: Theory and Research (Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1985). Turner, J. C. and S. A. Haslam, ‘Social identity, organisations, and leadership’, in M.E. Turner (ed.), Groups at Work: Advances in Theory and Research, Vol. 2 (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 2000). Wheatcroft, A., Infidels: A History of the Conflict between Christendom and Islam (London: Penguin, 2004). Wright, S. C., ‘Cross-group contact effects’, in S. Otten, K. Sassenberg and T. Kessler (eds), Intergroup Relations: The Role of Motivation and Emotion (Hove: Psychology Press, 2009).

CHAPTER 3 RULES, RECIPES, RUBRICS: A THEOLOGICAL ANATOMY OF CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM Martyn Percy

In 1853, an American writer by the name of Sarah Josepha Hale published the Woman’s Record, a handbook of godly and exemplary women from ancient times to the present. Her entry on Eve concludes with a reminder to her readers that Adam and Eve were ‘created on Friday, 28 October 4004 BC ’. The exact dating of Eve’s birth will seem strange and risible to modern readers. Yet many nineteenthcentury people in Britain and in America, and especially those with education, would have agreed that the world was a mere 6,000 years old, and that the opening chapters of Genesis were more historical than analogical. That said, it was actually during this period that significant amounts of scientific evidence – both geological and biological – were beginning to emerge and challenge the biblical account of a six-day creation. However, fundamentalism is not only about creationism or literal readings of the Bible or other religious tests. Where it is, such views are often a superficial or symptomatic (rather than causal) consequence of the belief system. Fundamentalism is, more particularly, a general and particular reaction (in the phrase of Martin Marty) to ‘the mixed offerings of modernity’. Fundamentalism

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is parasitic within modernity; it feeds off what it fights. And without opposition, it dies.1 In its own self-conscious rectitude, the phenomenon of modern Christian fundamentalism is more like a cry of despair than a shout of hope, which partly accounts for the narrow and negative nature of belief that this type of sectarianism normally breeds. As a subject, fundamentalism continues as a pervasive and absorbing presence throughout the media, reflecting its inculcation into society, and also the numerous struggles that churches have undergone in attempting to come to terms with the phenomenon.2 However, the phenomenon is much broader than that, and defies much of the normal criticism levelled at it, precisely because it continues to defy decisive definition. Fundamentalist types of faith do not only rest on the propagation of the ‘basics’; these beliefs also need to be defended, which is why the issues of power, purity and sectarianism are never far away from the study of fundamentalism. However, it would be a mistake to assume that purity and power are only issues for small and kraal-like religious groups. Purity and power are issues for all Christians and all churches, and fundamentalism, as a phenomenon or subject to study, is simply a concentration of a ‘problem’ that affects many different faiths, including all forms of Christianity – including those that espouse liberalism or openness. Boundaries of definition can quickly become borders marking territory and, ultimately, barriers.

Terms of Reference As a term, ‘fundamentalism’ is arguably now so broad and pejorative as to be almost useless. Nevertheless, in connection with religion, the word still carries weight as a signifier of attitude, temperament, doctrine and ideology. But the use of the term is diverse and fissiparous. It can be linked to religious extremism within nationalist movements in almost any world faith. Equally, fundamentalism can be manifest in a variety of political movements (‘religio-political activism’). Jerry Falwell’s ‘Moral Majority’ in the United States campaigned for a particularly conservative social outlook. Billy Graham has been a key confidant to Republican presidents such as Nixon and Reagan. In Central America, the Guatemalan government of Rı´os Montt (1981) drew heavily on ultraconservative Protestant outlooks to reform the nation. More broadly, the

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word is now used as a prefix – in a usually less than complimentary manner – to denigrate individuals and groups with some preponderance towards extremism, and occasionally violence. One issue for those working in the social sciences is the inaccurate, lazy and widespread use of the term, which strictly speaking only applies to a small group of Christians. But like so many words, it has come to mean more than it originally meant. There is of course a great deal of literature on the subject from a variety of perspectives. There are trenchant defences of the term from scholars such as James Packer (Fundamentalism and the Word of God, 1958). Thorough histories of the term have also been undertaken (see Harriet Harris, Fundamentalism and Evangelicals, 1998). There is also an enormous range of analyses from the social sciences (see Lionel Kaplan, Studies in Religious Fundamentalism, 1987). Scholars such as James Barr, Scott Appleby, Martin Marty, Mark Noll and Nancy Ammerman are continuous contributors to debates about its origin, direction and ethos. Their critiques are broadly socio-theological, but extensive psychological and anthropological treatments are also available in abundance. Of special note is the five-volume series that undertakes a substantial global study of fundamentalism, edited by Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, which arose out of a major study called the Fundamentalism Project. In terms of Christianity, fundamentalism is a recent movement, opposed to ‘the mixed offerings of modernity’. It takes its name from The Fundamentals, a series of pamphlets issued in the United States between 1909 and 1916, which sought to argue for and reassert conservative views on doctrine. A world conference on fundamentals was subsequently convened in Philadelphia in 1919, in reaction to liberally inclined theology. In part, this precipitated the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention. But fundamentalism has also spawned countless seminaries, ministries and new denominations. The spiritual roots of Christian fundamentalism lie in revivalism, holiness movements, nonconformity and an assortment of sectarian responses to the world. In terms of more recent history, ‘fundamentalism’ has matured into a more comprehensive (post-modern) response that fights on various fronts, often in a sophisticated way (e.g. TV, radio, political lobbying, etc.). Similarly, Islamic fundamentalism fights against secularism, Western imperialism/colonialisation, social and economic

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injustice, nominal Islam, ‘impure’ Islam, Zionism/Israel and the power of the non-Muslim world. According to Jeff Haynes, there are now two types of fundamentalism.3 The first is concerned with the strict ordering of religion and society according to revealed texts. The second, where the boundaries and status of scriptures are less clear, fundamentalism tends to be concerned with cultural or national purity. So the history of fundamentalism is more about the use of a relatively modern term than it is concerned with tracing one particular movement. From the beginning, fundamentalism has been difficult to define; it is a spongy, imprecise word that covers a considerable variety of individuals, bodies and movements.

Some General Characteristics The sheer breadth of Christian fundamentalism makes it a difficult movement to characterise. Indeed, because it is not one movement, but rather a term that describes diverse forms of behaviour, belief and practice that are widespread, extreme caution should be observed in using the word at all. Nevertheless, the Fundamentalism Project argues that there are nine characteristics that typify fundamentalism. Five of these are ideological in outlook: a reaction to the perceived marginalisation of religion; selectivity of religious essentials and issues; moral dualism; a commitment to an inerrant scripture and a tendency towards absolutism; millennialism and ‘messianic’ interests. The remaining four characteristics are organisational: an ‘elect’ membership (i.e. an elite, whose identity is clear); sharp delineation of boundaries (e.g. ‘saved’ and ‘unsaved’, ‘church’ and ‘world’, etc); authoritarian and charismatic leadership (i.e. anointed leader, guru, etc.); and behavioural requirements (e.g. abstinence, etc.). The vast majority of the expressions of fundamentalism from within the ‘Abrahamic’ faiths (i.e. Christian, Jewish and Muslim) exhibit these characteristics. Many expressions of fundamentalism that fall outside this category (e.g. Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, etc.) also share most if not all of these characteristics. In a slightly different vein, Martin Marty sees fundamentalism almost entirely as a matter of ‘fighting’ – against the world and the devil, for a theocracy, with righteousness, and so forth. He also notes how the ‘mindset’ is reliant on control and authority, echoing the work of James Barr’s critiques, amongst others.4

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A common misconception about fundamentalism is that it is simplistic. On the contrary, the structure of fundamentalist thinking is, far from being simple and clear, highly complex, differentiated, accommodating and fluid. Exegesis (i.e. reading meaning ‘out of’ a text), eisegesis (i.e. reading meaning ‘in to’ a text), interpretation and exposition abound. The Bible can function almost totemically in some communities, whilst in others it provides illumination, inspiration and canonicity – but is rarely read or regarded as wholly inerrant. There is, in short, no precise agreement on the nature of the Bible and what it determines of itself for fundamentalists. Some have ‘high’ views of inspiration, but have abandoned inerrancy. Others qualify inerrancy, insisting that the doctrine only applies to original autographs, excludes grammatical errors or misspellings, and is exempted from lack of precision in certain matters, or apparent contradictions. This leads scholars to identify at least five different versions of the doctrine of inerrancy: propositional (absolute); pietistic (i.e. a kind of spiritual biblicism); nuanced (some portions of scripture weigh more than others); critical (identifies non-essential errors); and functional (limited inerrancy, or particular infallibility). Each of these versions will produce a distinct kind of spiritual harvest. The freedom to interpret some parts of the Bible analogically instead of historically will open up particular vistas of meaning for the reader. Even in the most tightly defined fundamentalist communities, there is considerable divergence on what constitutes an inerrant bible. And bearing in mind that, for such communities, authority flows from the inerrancy of scripture (which is to say that ecclesial and ministerial authority is regarded as being under the Word), the patterns of authority and teaching in such communities will vary widely. Where there are similarities between them, they may be morphological rather than doctrinal (in other words a matter of style, not substance). The role of women in faiths and society is an arena where fundamentalist views can be tested and studied comparatively. In Protestant Christian fundamentalism, the majority of churches and movements will not regard women holding spiritual authority or office to be either appropriate or biblical. But there will be some notable exceptions to this. For example, a small number of ‘House Churches’ will recognise women as having an Apostolic ministry of oversight and leadership, although this is still a relatively rare feature in the house church movement.

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In Christianity, a more fundamentalist outlook tends to assign an apparently ‘traditional’ role to women – as wife, mother and homemaker5 – which some women may experience as ‘empowering’. In certain religious traditions, women will be barred from certain ritual activities such as public prayer, or will be required to carry out worship in a segregated arena. But at the same time, there are some scholars who take the view that women can be spiritually empowered by what is apparently manifest oppression. Ironically, the spirituality of women in fundamentalist communities can have a powerful leavening effect upon the overall polity of a movement, and several studies have shown that women can feel liberated and empowered by particular expressions of fundamentalism. Invariably, the roles assigned to women are traced back to (apparent) scriptural norms, but this can lead to some peculiar anomalies. For example, in college and university Christian Unions (Inter-Varsity Fellowship in the United States and Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowships in the United Kingdom), women are often not allowed to hold authority at particular levels, and some will forbid women from addressing main meetings. This tradition is observed in spite of the fact that Christian Unions are not churches, and the scriptural injunctions pertaining to women holding authority only seem to be applicable in ecclesial contexts. Suffice to say, debate on the issue within any Christian Union would normally be seen as divisive. But Christian Unions are by no means unique in holding to a literalist or fundamentalist interpretation on the role of women. Within mainstream Christian denominations, some will assert that Jesus’ choice of male apostles has always implied that women should not hold authority in churches. Some will go further, and argue that the maleness of Christ reveals an absolute truth about appropriate priestly representation. Thus, a review of the authority of the bible in different denominations would reveal a similarly significant range of diversity. Some treat the sacred text as a ‘Rule Book’ (instructions to be followed, carefully), others as a ‘Guidebook’ (a few rules, many recommendations, warnings, suggestions, etc.), with most interchanging between the two. (But is it not the case that the parabolic tradition of Jesus gives the church precisely this permission to act so fluidly?). Ecclesial communities and fundamentalist movements are unavoidably hermeneutical rather than (vapidly) receptive. They are within the (ultimate) parable of Jesus Christ – experiencing God’s story of incarnation,

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redemption and resurrection as it continues to unfold within them and around them: the Word made flesh. This makes them responsive and reflexive in character; their only difference, arguably, lies in the degrees to which differences and diversity are tolerated. It is a common misconception of Christian fundamentalism to imagine that it is merely concerned with rules. It is usually a more subtle blend of beseeching: rules, recipes and rubrics that share a common thread, namely protecting or removing the believer from the world, and at the same time offering them an alternative theological construction of reality that enables them to survive, and perhaps flourish. So in talking about fundamentalism in this way, it is important to remember that although (allegedly) inerrant texts frequently play a major part in defining the movement and constituting its identity, other ‘agents’ may operate just as effectively as fundamentals. A pope or guru, a type of experience, or even a moral code, can all function just as programmatically. Fundamentalism remains a broad umbrella term for a cluster of movements that are habitually restless within the world. Fundamentalism seeks clarity in the midst of ambiguity. It strives to locate and celebrate certainty in the midst of doubt. It anticipates and expects faith to triumph over secular reason. At the same time, it cannot be said that fundamentalism absolutely and necessarily resists modernity. Fundamentalists are remarkably adept at accommodating the world in order to achieve their higher religious, political and social purposes. Thus, whilst some may decry the influence of the media or the internet, it is precisely in such arenas that fundamentalists are also to be found at their most active. Fundamentalism, in other words, does not simply resist modernity; it also engages with it – radically – in order to achieve the restoration of a ‘purer’ form of faith that will provide a credible alternative to secularity. Fundamentalism therefore continues to be a diverse but pervasive spiritual force within most developed and developing societies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The Specifics of Fundamentalism and Scripture As Marty and Appleby have pointed out in their landmark studies, there is not one single fundamentalism, but rather many different forms of fundamentalism. Each ‘species’ has a particular aspect to its character,

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and foci of concern that make it distinctive and separate from its neighbours. Moreover, as reactions to modernity, the fundamentalisms one encounters have, inevitably, accrued aspects of the very modernity they oppose. Thus, denigrations of the ‘godless’ media prompt an exclusively religious alternative. Similarly, the ‘Health and Wealth’ movement can be said, on one level, to compete with Americanised versions of pragmatism, consumerism and positive thinking. Yet fundamentalism, despite the variety of expressions, does share one, broad and common concern, namely the place of scripture. Even if one accepts that the ‘value’ of the bible in fundamentalism fluctuates across expressions – ‘totemic’ in one place, through to literal forms of micro-management of believers’ lives in another – scripture remains key to understanding the movement.6 One can see this clearly by looking at the different nuances that attribute power, authority and control to scripture, across the panoply of fundamentalist discourse. Generally, scholars agree that the (so-called) ‘five points’ or pillars of fundamentalism rest on the inerrancy of scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, his substitutionary atonement, his bodily resurrection and pre-millennialism – or a literal belief in the second coming of Christ. However, some Protestant fundamentalists substitute this last pillar or point with a literal belief in the authenticity of Christ’s miracles. Even here, then, we can see that there is more or less complete homogeneity amongst fundamentalists about their five supporting pillars or key points – something that becomes even more apparent when ultra-conservative evangelicals are compared to fundamentalists.7 Here, the situation becomes even more complex, for the two are not the same, even though Barr8 would have us think so. The discrepancies emerge especially in relation to the defence of the authority or inerrancy of scripture: The historical faith of the Church has always been that all the affirmations of Scripture of all kinds whether of spiritual doctrine or duty, or of physical or historical fact, or of psychological or philosophical principle, are without any error when the ipsissima verba of the original autographs are ascertained and interpreted in their natural and intended sense.9 Yet the debate on the slight, subtle and nuanced difference between authority and inspiration remains a lively one for fundamentalists and

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conservative evangelicals, with the penumbra of opinion broader than some suppose. John Stott, a conservative evangelical, and not a selfidentifying fundamentalist, asks a question of himself (‘are evangelicals fundamentalists?’) and so writes of scriptural authority in these terms: The fundamentalist emphasizes so strongly the divine origin of Scripture that he tend to forget that it also had human authors who used sources, syntax, and words to convey their message, whereas the evangelical remembers the double authorship of Scripture [. . .] . On the one hand, God spoke, deciding what he wished to say, although without crushing the personality of the human authors. On the other hand, men spoke, using their human faculties, though without distorting the message of the divine author.10 Here, Stott begins to stake out an interesting argument for conservative evangelicals. Authority – even the absolute authority of the bible – does not appear to need an inerrant scripture. Stott appears to accept that divine and human agencies are different, and that to attribute perfection to any source of revelation is to deny the inevitable role of human agency. Here, he at least shows that he might at least have some sympathy with the traces of Nancey Murphy’s argument,11 which seeks to preserve some foundationalism, but without resorting to fundamentalism.12 Yet the argument amongst conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists relating to the identity of scripture – its source, authority and inerrancy – refuses to go away: I cannot see how Billy Graham says he believes the Bible is the Word of God (He knows that all we know about Jesus Christ, His virgin birth, His incarnation, His vicarious blood atonement, His bodily resurrection, and His coming again, is what is clearly taught in the Word of God.) and can be sponsored by preachers who do not believe these fundamentals and give to these preachers the same recognition that he gives to God’s faithful, sacrificing servants who refuse to compromise.13 Similarly, James Packer argues that to attribute authority to scripture, but not inerrancy, is to step on to a dangerous ground, in which the place and power of the bible is ultimately weakened:

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God caused to be written precisely what He wished, and His words were in no way altered or corrupted by the human agent through whom they were written down; so that we have no right to say of anything in Scripture that it is merely a human idea and not part of God’s word.14 The issue at stake here is perhaps less about the status of the bible and more about divine revelation. Fundamentalists appear to be arguing for a theory of revelation in which what God utters or imparts is received in its original perfect state. To believe that, there must be no human or cultural agency involved in the reification of that revelation. This, then, reduces the role of human agency to zero. It is merely a passive receptor. To put this in more modern idiom, we might say that this is a kind of ‘fax theory’ of scripture. It is penned in heaven, and received in its perfected state on earth (the ‘original autographs’ are therefore held to be perfect); but any errors – only minor ones being permitted – arise solely out of mistakes in copying or translation. Of course, this is a fundamentalist theory of scripture. But it is not one that the bible claims for itself. One simply cannot rest an argument of biblical infallibility of 2 Timothy 3:16. All scripture may indeed ‘be inspired by God and profitable for reroof and teaching’, as the writer of the epistle notes. But the words ‘inerrant’ or ‘infallible’ are not used: ‘inspired’ (literally, ‘God-breathed’) is the chosen term deployed by the author of 2 Timothy. Moreover, the Bible, as book, has no self-conscious identity expressed within itself. Its very existence, as scholars have noted, is a consequence of Christianity, and not its cause. Christian faith existed before the scriptures reached the aggregate we now refer to as ‘the Bible’. Indeed, the intentional uses of the plural here – scriptures – is also material in understanding how fundamentalists try to ‘frame’ the Bible. By attributing a monological authority to the Bible, the dialogical dynamics are ignored. Christian orthodoxy is clear that scripture does indeed contain a record of what God says to humanity. But it is also a record of the reaction of humanity, and how humanity experiences that revelation, and in some cases replies (e.g. the psalms, Job, etc.). The Bible is scriptures (plural) – dynamic, dialogical and diverse. And just for good measure there are different varieties of the bible too, as Protestants, Catholics and other denominations will testify. So the fundamentalist framing of scripture as unilinear and

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monological is in fact reductive15 rather than orthodox. In trying to define and delimit God’s revelatory power, in order to keep it both pure and concentrated, fundamentalists, by arguing that revelation is clear, comprehensible and controlling, ultimately compromise the very essence they seek to defend from modernity. Exactly the same theological dynamic – flawed faith, in reality – can be located in the other four pillars of fundamentalism. Power is the key, along with reification and conflation. If fundamentalists believe that the power of God is fully and absolutely reified in the bible, the interpreter of the bible will find their authority wholly confused and conflated with the authority (i.e. the Bible) to which they appeal.16 Thus, to dissent with the interpreter’s authoritative view of scripture can be tantamount to disobeying God; to question the interpretation will be to risk excommunication and damnation. But for others – usually of a more mainstream, broad or liberal persuasion – God acts and speaks through channels and agents that are part of the created order, and so not perfected. In this view, God works through culture, peoples and history, not over and against them. Correspondingly, the power of God is only ever known provisionally and not absolutely; it can only be encountered ‘through a glass darkly’, and not ‘face to face’. There is less emphasis on absolute reification, so less risk of divine –human conflations. So although the power of God may be pure and absolute at source, God invariably chooses to mediate that power through less than perfect agents (such as language, people, times and places). And this is because God’s primary interest is in disclosing love in order to draw us into relationships, and not in unequivocal demonstrations of power, which would leave no room for a genuinely free response, but merely obedience in the face of oppression. This, of course, gets to the heart of the matter. The dominance of fundamentalist churches over their flocks is achieved through ‘governance by hermeneutics’, coupled with the intrusive pastoral surveillance normally found in weekly home groups and close-knit fellowship meetings. It is this, arguably, that scrutinises the lives and loves of individuals in congregations, and marks fundamentalist congregations out as distinctive. It has long been the case that in fundamentalist congregations, it is not the bible that has the final authority, but rather the interpreter. Moreover, for many fundamentalists, the bible has a totemic value too. They are ‘bible-carrying Christians’.17

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To carry a bible – especially of a particular kind – is to carry a badge of identity.18 The bible is carried and applied as a toolkit or rule book; or as a pragmatic guidebook, useful for resolving immediate and pressing issues. The Biblicism is a worldview that ‘works’ within a particular form of ecclesial ethos.19 Paula Nesbitt has argued that the identity of scripture is what shapes ecclesial, social and moral horizons: (the authority of the bible) could be used to countervail the relativism of cross-cultural alliances without affecting their strategic utility: symbolic authority. The symbol, as a locus of authority, has a tangible and timeless nature. Where the symbol is an authoritative part of the institutional milieu, either traditional or rational authority must acknowledge its legitimacy [. . .] scripture is an authoritative symbol.20 Nesbitt points out that when scripture is itself canonised by fundamentalist ecclesial groups, it is the interpreter and the church that then go on to assume the mantle of absolute authority: Scripture, when canonized as complete or absolute, becomes symbolic of a particular era or set of teachings and beliefs [. . .] the use of scripture as symbolic authority can be constructed and constituted according to selecting those aspects or passages that address an issue at hand. Furthermore, scripture as symbolic authority can be objectified or absolutized, which transcends cultural boundaries in a way that other forms of authority can less easily do. The appeal of scriptural literalism provides an objectification of authority that is independent of the influence or control of dominant perspectives, social locations, and circumstances. As symbolic authority, it can be leveraged against cultural dominance as well as provide common ground for cross-cultural alliances.21 And yet within this, as we have seen, there remain issues for fundamentalists – not least scripture itself, where the precise nature of revelation – inspired, authoritative, infallible or inerrant are all terms with different weights and values – which need to be resolved within the wider movement. It is to this exercise that we now turn.

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De-coding Fundamentalisms What then, do forms of Christian fundamentalism have in common? How do the rules, rubrics and recipes within the movement function? Is the movement caught between treating the Bible as a rulebook, when most Western readers – even those within fundamentalist churches – regard it as a resource, and read it like a guidebook? One could point to the mechanistic logic that underpins the movement; a kind of antienlightenment pseudo-science that reconstructs religious belief as rationality rather than faith. And indeed, this is one relatively common feature of fundamentalism, namely its appeal to the faculty of reason, based on apparent evidence. Yet it is important to be cautious about any preliminary identification of common denominators that seem to capture the essence of fundamentalism. Because so many groups are now labelled ‘fundamentalist’, the concept has now arguably become so ‘spongy’ that it is in urgent need of redefinition. Conventionally, the word has usually been employed with reference to individuals or organisations that operate by ‘strict adherence to traditional orthodox tenets (e.g. the literal inerrancy of scripture) held to be fundamental to the Christian faith’, as well as ‘being opposed to liberalism and modernism’. Whilst this definition tells us something about part of the nature of fundamentalism, it does not go far enough. Fundamentalism is not simply a set of constructive propositions designed to oppose modernist thinking, and to advance what is held to be original orthodoxy. It is a relational phenomenon too, a way of being in the world, offering a social and mythic construction of reality for participants, which offers a secure identity, along with personal and corporate value. Increasingly, it is an expression of ‘furious religion’; a manifestation of militant, angry conservatism that protests about values and ideologies it sees as corrosive and sinful. Martin Marty has noted some of this fury, and characterises fundamentalism as ‘a world-wide reaction against many of the mixed offerings of modernity’ appealing to those who look for ‘authoritarian solutions’ in relational problems. He notes that differing fundamentalist groups are often deeply hostile to each other, even if there is a measure of broad agreement on the nature and location of fundamental articles of faith. Marty’s explanation for this is that fundamentalism appeals to a particular class and personality type. Indeed, he sees the actual fundamentals themselves as a smoke screen, and goes so far as to state

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that fundamentalists are not so much motivated by religious belief as by psychological disposition, social forces and historical circumstance. Noting that Catholic, Jewish, Christian and Islamic fundamentalists all share the same mindset, he states: It is not productive to dwell on fundamentalist theology and point out its contradiction and errors. The [fundamentals] [. . .] are merely tools, excuses or alibis for the fundamentalist mindset. Without the mindset, the doctrines wither.22 Marty’s observations are useful. Yet his analysis still tends to treat fundamentalism as though it were a unified phenomenon, its many adherents believing roughly the same thing, behaving essentially in the same way – but just getting on badly with one another. This is problematic, since if we analyse how fundamentalists define and describe themselves, a wide polarity of views quickly begins to surface. For example, some self-defined fundamentalists believe the charismatic (or Pentecostal) movement is, at best, contrary to the will of God: ‘On the basis of Scriptural evidence we have concluded that [. . .] the modern tongues movement is not of God’. Meanwhile, Jerry Falwell, another self-confessed fundamentalist, points out in his The Fundamentalist Phenomenon that the Pentecostalcharismatic movement [. . .] is based upon the fundamental doctrinal foundation’. Other fundamentalists deny the right of people like Billy Graham to own the title ‘fundamentalist’ – he is too liberal, they claim, and co-operates with Roman Catholics. James Packer, author of Fundamentalism and the Word of God (1958) would disagree, however. Although uneasy about the term ‘fundamentalist’, he nevertheless, as an evangelical, concludes that ‘evangelical doctrine is fundamentalist’, with the term ‘fundamental’ pervading most apologetic work done by selfconfessed evangelicals, anxious to distinguish themselves from some fundamentalist doctrine. Carl F. H. Henry conducts a sustained attack on James Barr in volume 4 of his God Revelation and Authority (1979). He questions Barr’s broad and tireless use of the term ‘fundamentalism’, but then warns his readers not to reject evangelicalism which affirms ‘the literal truth of an inerrant Bible’. It is difficult to see here what upsets evangelicals like Packer and Henry most about Barr’s Fundamentalism: his critique, or merely his terminology?

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Pursuing this question of terminology is important here, because it is an acute difficulty for many of its subjects, and with good reason. Fundamentalist attitudes can be found in a wide variety of individuals and communities, and yet few wish to own a title with such pejorative connotations. However, from our brief survey so far, the term ‘fundamentalism’ can at least be used to describe a set of common social, theological and ecclesiological outlooks, shared between traditional fundamentalists (i.e. Anti-Pentecostal), some evangelicals, and those from the charismatic movement or Pentecostalism. A good analogy might be to describe the ‘movement’ as a (dysfunctional?) family tree – all are connected and related, even if some members sometimes wish this were not so. What, then, unites these disparate family members? Five hallmarks suggest themselves. Firstly, contemporary fundamentalism is a ‘backward-looking legitimation’ for present forms of ministry and belief. Present patterns of operation are justified in legalistic and historicist fashion via a claim on an exclusive validity for one line (or a very small core) of developments from Scripture, that refuses to recognise the diversity and development of others. In other words, an absolute authority must be established. This in turn affords participants a viable perception of reality in the modern world, a template through which experience can be processed. Some of these experiences themselves – as in the case of charismatics or Pentecostal – can then become actual fundamentals, although the validating line of interpretation – usually an interpretation of a text or texts, or possibly a written creed or articles of faith – often remains the supreme authority. This backward looking legitimation is subsequently represented by a myth or constellation of myths that are ‘at home’ in the modern age. The metaphor ‘home’ is not meant to connote an impression of happiness or comfort. Instead, it suggests that these mythic constructs provide a perception of reality that is more usually opposed to many aspects of Western culture. It is ‘at home’ however, because it eclectically ‘maps’ traditional Christian mythologies and symbols onto the modern situation, thus forming a basic comprehensive cognitive picture of how the world is, how it should be, and how it will be. This cognitive picture is comprehensive enough to influence, amongst other things, family life, the role of women,23 attitudes to politics, other faiths, ethics and questions about life after death.

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Secondly, fundamentalism is dialectical: it exists in relation to and opposition to trends in society that it perceives as modernist (i.e. where the authority of the existing tradition is challenged), pluralist (i.e. the dissipation of ‘common beliefs’ and moral values related to religion, giving rise to competition in society between competing convictions; what was once implicit must now become explicit in order to survive), or compromised. Thus, it is programmatic; it aims at reversing certain traits and establishing a new type of order or perceptions of reality. This is most commonly expressed in the controlling symbol of ‘Holy War’ that is variously employed. It is a primary perceptual and conceptual lens through which the past, present and future is processed. Fundamentalists see their enterprise as a struggle, in which the order they seek to advance must overcome the present (ungodly) order. The trends of modernity that fundamentalists oppose are to be resisted precisely because they represent a threat to the authority that they place themselves under. Therefore, we can speak of fundamentalism being non-dialogical. It has nothing to receive from the world, since the world must receive them first, wholesale. Some sociologists of religion (such as Bryan Wilson) identify this phenomenon as sectarianism, which is usually quite correct. However, caution needs to be exercised in using that term, since it might indicate that fundamentalists are somehow retreating from the world. In fact the opposite is true; they are engaging with it most forcefully, yet with a faith that is committed to addressing a monologue to the world that arises out of their authoritarian dogma. Thirdly, although fundamentalism now enjoys considerable breadth of expression, including its own competing sectarian factions that deny each other the right to own the title, I nevertheless hold that there is a traceable phenomenon that we can call ‘fundamentalism’. By viewing it as a discrete set of cultural conventions or tendencies, a habit of mind, rather than a single movement or body, it is possible to discern a phenomenon that is widespread, yet with common features. It is an attitude, sometimes selective on subjects (e.g. sexuality) and found within traditions that are otherwise quite catholic or plural. These features generally include a hostile reaction to the mixed offerings of modernity, and to combat it, a set of ‘fundamentals’, such as a ‘core doctrine’, an absolute source of authority, a specific programme that is to be imposed rather than shared, and clear patterns for mediating authority and power. It might also be said to be a language, replete with authenticating procedures (e.g. ‘Have you

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been born again?’ or ‘Are you saved?’) that validates and recognises existing members, and sifts potential recruits. To respond to such questions quizzically or sarcastically is to speak a different language – one of questioning and doubt. For the believers who ask such questions, only certain types of answers, phrased in a range of quite particular ways, will suffice. In that sense, the questions are not, strictly speaking, open ones; they are, rather, modes of speech that will almost immediately establish rapport between the questioner and the responder. Fourthly, fundamentalism, like liberalism, is not just a theological perspective localised to a particular denomination (or even religion, although here I am only concerned with Christian fundamentalism for the moment). It is a trans-denominational phenomenon that denotes standpoints, attitudes, patterns of behaviour and theological methods. Although it has its origins in the emerging evangelicalism of the eighteenth century and in the ‘historic fundamentalism’ of the early twentieth century, contemporary fundamentalism’s chief nemesis is theological and ethical liberalism, which it opposes in varying degrees. In fact, what distinguishes fundamentalism from other similar faith perspectives is its opposition to liberalism: where opposition to liberalism is lacking, I hold that one cannot speak of true fundamentalism, but only of an analogue or close relative. At first sight, this might appear to rule out many charismatic or Pentecostal groups, but not so. These groups are just as anti-liberal; they simply construct their remedial programme differently. A good example of this is the British Evangelical Alliance, an umbrella organisation incorporating many different fundamentalist groups from different denominations, in order to bring a greater degree of pressure to bear on certain issues. Fifth and last, fundamentalism is a cultural-linguistic phenomenon. All of the studies discussed regard fundamentalism as a primarily noetic phenomenon, concerned with certain beliefs and doctrines, and propagating informational propositions. We have already noted this problematic aspect in some scholarly treatments of fundamentalism, namely the habit of treating fundamentalism as a (primarily) credal phenomenon. For example, the doctrine of inerrancy does not just exist to counter the excesses of form-criticism and Darwinist ideas about the origin of humanity. It is more subtle than that. The cognitive approach does not do justice to the rich intricacy of the fundamentalist universe; it fails to attend to how a doctrine like inerrancy helps constitute a habit of

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mind, viable perceptions of reality, in short, a whole world. Stories also help constitute communities, not just propositions; it is often the group’s own narrative that shapes its theology, as for example, in the case of fundamentalist Afrikaaners. Equally, fundamentalism cannot be regarded as just a matter of expressing experience. There is more to fundamentalism than a primordial religious feeling, which when articulated becomes thematised into a type of determinate ‘mystical’ language. For example, Methodists do not all seek to have their hearts ‘strangely warmed’ as Wesley did. It is the telling of the story, with its message of intervention and immanent change, the hope of transformation, and the renewal of inner beings, that helps place that story centrally in the Methodist tradition. The point of expressing experience belongs in a wider context. So, fundamentalism should probably be best read (or de-coded) as a comprehensive interpretative schema, employing myths or narratives that structure human experience and understanding of the self and the world. This view recognises the power of language to shape, mould and delimit human experience, to the extent that it may be said that the way language itself is used can give rise to certain experiences. If fundamentalism can be seen as a cultural-linguistic system, the operating scaffold of symbolism within can be shown to be part of the idiom that describes realities, formulates beliefs and the experiencing of inner attitudes, feelings and sentiments: in short, a complete interpretative framework. Moreover, like a culture or language, fundamentalism as a tendency is a communal phenomenon that shapes the subjectives of individuals and the objectives of communities, rather than being a manifestation of them. It comprises a vocabulary of discursive and non-discursive symbols, together with a distinctive logic or grammar in terms of which this vocabulary can be deployed. It is a form of life, with cognitive and behavioural dimensions; its doctrines, cosmic understandings, myths and ethics relating to the ritual practices, the sentiments and experiences evoked, the actions recommended, and the subsequent institutional form that develops. All this is suggested in comparing fundamentalism to a ‘cultural-linguistic system’. With these five qualifying hallmarks in mind, the definition of fundamentalism proposed here is quite broad. Indeed, much of what could be described as Christianity fits the description: but this does not invalidate the definition. Much of Christianity is organised around

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fundamental articles or excluding creeds, and many scholars have affirmed that Christianity has been a form of fundamentalism for much of its history. So, is there anything that separates fundamentalism from ‘ordinary’ Christianity, that simply organises itself around a set of fundamentals? I would suggest there is, with the difference locating itself in a variety of arenas, of which I single out just three. Firstly, the fundamentals are held differently: doctrines tend to be ‘tight’, rigorously defined, and used as a controlling mechanism within for the establishment of ecclesial order. The doctrine of an inerrant Bible is a clear example, being a symbolic reminder of the closed and complete revelation that orchestrates relationships and doctrine. In contrast, non-fundamentalists generally recognise that their faith and ‘[religious] knowledge is incomplete’ (1 Corinthians 13:9), resulting in a commitment to dialogue and openness rather than monologue. Secondly, and linked to this, is the question over the nature of truth. Fundamentalists deny the ambiguity or contradiction of truth, seeking to press for a uniformity of truth that will effectively govern life. Truth, and the homogenous groups resulting from interaction with it, emerge as an exclusive concept, with no space for error, non-aligned interpretation of appropriate ambiguity. Non-fundamentalist Christians acknowledge the necessity of contradiction in truth, which generally gives rise to a higher degree of tolerance for plurality of truth-expression. Thirdly, nonfundamentalists also have a more substantial volume of truth on which to draw: history, creeds, liturgy and the like. This creates a larger framework of tradition, which gives for dialogue and difference; a capaciousness that can cope with contestability, if you will. The actual ‘size’ of Anglican tradition, for example, prevents its ‘members’ from being fundamentalist: there are 39 Articles, a Prayer Book, priests, deacons and bishops, besides a well-developed historical and cultural framework for processing awkward theological issues and complex ethical questions. Thus, Anglicans only start to behave like fundamentalists when they dogmatically insist on the sole primacy of one aspect of tradition, such as the Book of Common Prayer, and deny others.

Conclusion The irony in the emergence of the fundamentalism ‘movement’ is that it remains a peculiarly modernist construction of reality. It is a kind of

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pseudo-science and quasi-rationality that abrogates its own selfconsciousness. Despite its claims to purity, it is self-evidently a byproduct of hybridity. It imagines itself to be amongst the purest expressions of faith; but in so doing, often substitutes a narrow heterodoxy for a broad orthodoxy. Thus, and in the case of Christian fundamentalism, it often refuses to recognise that the Bible is a consequence of Christianity, and not its major cause. In seeking to uphold the ‘plain meaning’ of scripture, there has to be some kind of denial that Christians do not disagree so much about what the Bible says as what it means, and what kind of weight to attach to the different passages, and their many nuances. The emergence of fundamentalism as a major force within world religion is now well into its second century. The term ‘fundamentalism’ has successfully migrated and evolved from referring to a specific group of Christians in the early twentieth century, to defining more generic behavioural and ideological positions within other established religious traditions. Invariably, such positions involve hostility towards secular modernity, and to any (allegedly) compromised religious tradition. The term fundamentalism has now become an indicator: of fury, resistance, power and theocracy. Its detractors still cast it as an oppressive and simplistic form of religiosity. But its resilience, vibrancy and adaptability suggest that scholars need to take its cultural complexity and directive sagacity ever-more seriously. There is no sign that modernity will gradually dissolve emergent fundamentalisms. Indeed, some indications seem to point in the opposite direction.

Notes 1. G. Kepel, The Revenge of God (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). 2. S. Bruce, Fundamentalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). 3. J. Haynes, Religion, Fundamentalism and Ethnicity (United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1995). 4. M. Percy and I. Jones, Fundamentalism, Church and Society (London: SPCK, 2002). 5. M. Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender: 1875 to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 6. B. Malley, How the Bible Works: An Anthropological Study of Evangelical Biblicism (New York: Altamira Press, 2004). 7. H. Harris, Fundamentalism and Evangelicals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 8. J. Barr, Fundamentalism (London: SCM Press, 1978).

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9. A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, ‘Inspiration’, The Presbyterian Review 6: 238 (2 April 1881). 10. J. Stott, ‘Are Evangelicals Fundamentalists?’ Christianity Today: 45– 6 (8 September 1978). 11. N. Murphy, Beyond Fundamentalism and Liberalism (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996). 12. P. Berger, Between Relativism and Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). 13. B. Jones Sr., Letter 6 March 1957, explaining why he cannot support Billy Graham. In the Fundamentalism File, Bob Jones University, cited in Harris, 1998. 14. J. I. Packer, ‘The Fundamentalism Controversy: Retrospect and Prospect’, Faith and Thought 90/1: 11 (1958); J. I. Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God (London: InterVarsity Press, 1958). 15. Murphy, Beyond Fundamentalism and Liberalism. 16. M. Percy, Words, Wonders and Power: Understanding Contemporary Christian Fundamentalism and Revivalism (London: SPCK, 1995). 17. D. Harrington Watt, Bible-carrying Christians (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 18. P. Bramadat, The Church on the World’s Turf (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 19. Malley, How the Bible Works. 20. P. Nesbitt, Religion and Social Policy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). 21. Nesbitt, Religion and Social Policy. 22. M. Marty, Religion and Republic (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987). 23. Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender.

Bibliography Barr, J., Fundamentalism (London: SCM Press, 1978). Bendroth, M., Fundamentalism and Gender: 1875 to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). Berger, P., Between Relativism and Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). Bramadat, P., The Church on the World’s Turf (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Bruce, S., Fundamentalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Harrington Watt, D., Bible-carrying Christians (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Harris, H., Fundamentalism and Evangelicals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Hodge, A. A. and B. B. Warfield, ‘Inspiration’, The Presbyterian Review (2 April 1881). Kepel, G., The Revenge of God (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994). Malley, B., How the Bible Works: An Anthropological Study of Evangelical Biblicism (New York: Altamira Press, 2004). Murphy, N., Beyond Fundamentalism and Liberalism (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996).

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Marty, M., Religion and Republic (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987). Marty, M. and S. Appleby, Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992). Nesbitt, P., Religion and Social Policy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). Packer, J. I., ‘The Fundamentalism Controversy: Retrospect and Prospect’, Faith and Thought 90/1 (1958). —— Fundamentalism and the Word of God (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1958). Percy, M., Words, Wonders and Power: Understanding Contemporary Christian Fundamentalism and Revivalism (London: SPCK, 1995). Percy, M., and I. Jones, Fundamentalism, Church and Society (London: SPCK, 2002). Stott, J., ‘Are Evangelicals Fundamentalists?’, Christianity Today (8 September 1978).

CHAPTER 4 ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM Ed Husain

Introduction I want to begin by saying that, within the Muslim tradition, the word ‘fundamentalism’ doesn’t translate particularly well. In Arabic, it may be rendered as asl or usu¯l, ‘fundamentals’, or as usu¯lı¯, ‘fundamentalist’. But ˙ ˙ ˙ being an usu¯lı¯ in the Islamic tradition is not necessarily a bad thing. ˙ Although the terms ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘Muslim fundamentalist’ connote suicide bombings, extremism, segregation, confrontation, and isolationism in the West, for Muslims, having usu¯l or fundamentals is ˙ inherently positive. In fact, if I were to be described as a ‘Muslim fundamentalist’, when I was traveling in the Muslim east, I would not be offended, especially if it were a reference in observant Muslim circles. I believe that this perspective is due to the fact that we – and here I speak not as a spokesperson for Islam but simply as a Muslim – are not ashamed of our history nor do we have any existential angst in terms of trying to reconcile the fundamentals of our faith with the modern world. Professor Michael Cook has spoken about the accommodationist vein developed within Islam that has allowed us to adapt to the modern world without the kind of difficulties that other faith traditions may have. So with these broad and perhaps somewhat contentious opening remarks, I want to say two things: I am using the word ‘fundamentalist’ in the Western sense and not in the Muslim or Eastern sense, and I am using the word ‘fundamentalist’ with these caveats in mind.

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There are two strands within Islam that can be considered fundamentalist: Islamism and Salafism. I will define and distinguish these two ideological trends shortly, but first I will make some general remarks about both. It is worth noting that about 90 per cent of the world’s Muslims are neither Salafis nor Islamists. Here, I am referencing a 2011 report published by the Ahl al-Bayt Society in Jordan that questioned Muslims about their sectarian affiliation. While I do not consider Islamism and Salafism to be sects comparable to, say, Islmailis, this study found that approximately 10 per cent of all Muslims are of those persuasions. Furthermore, both Islamism and Salafism, or Wahhabism as it is also known, are modern phenomena. The ideas that the Salafis and Islamists speak about today would have been alien to a Muslim even as recently as 150 years ago. It is only over the last 60 years that the language of fundamentalists has become more prominent. Gaetano Mosca said, ‘It’s the organized minority that controls a disorganized majority’, and that is exactly what can be seen being played out across the Muslim world. A minority of Islamists control the public messaging of a majority of the world’s Muslims.’ The organised minority of Salafis and Islamists, and their ideational overlap, has created a voice that is much louder than the vast majority of Muslims. You can call this latter group whatever you like – the disorganised majority, the silent majority – but they are the moderate mainstream who are mostly concerned with getting on with their daily business. It is the Islamists and the Salafis that interest us because they are the organised, vocal minority. They are the ones who engage in violence and who have adopted a masculine, black-and-white, confrontational, and rigid agenda that seeks to impose their unique reading of sharia as state law. To distinguish the Islamists and Salafis from their more mainstream brethren, it is necessary to broadly define normative Islam. Islam is an Abrahamic religion that has been around for more than 1,400 years. In essence, it is a spiritual pathway that calls for a person to believe that God is one (tawhı¯d in Arabic), to believe in the Abrahamic or Old Testament prophets, to believe that Jesus was a prophet of God rather than a child or son of God, and to believe that the Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad, who is the last in this series of prophets. Muslims also believe that in the next life we will be brought to account for our deeds in this world. Everything else in Islam is open to debate, discussion, scrutiny, and questioning. But it is faith, or iman, in these three

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aspects – the belief in one God, the belief in the Prophet Muhammad and his revelation (the Qur’an), and the belief in accountability to God in the afterlife – that defines Islam. It is not a complicated religion. Its simplicity is summarised in the short, beautiful, and poetic verses of the latter part of the Qur’an, which initially appealed to the equally simple Arab Bedouins. The complexity of the religion has been built up over the past 1,400 years, but, at its core, Islam is a simple faith.

Islamism Islamism is a political ideology. It was born in the 1930s and 1940s at the hands of people such as Mawdudi in the Indian subcontinent and Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb in Egypt. The first point I want to make about Islamism is that, regardless of whether it was the Jamaat-eIslami in the Indian subcontinent or the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world, it began as a response to colonialism. I am not necessarily blaming colonialism for the rise of Islamism. Nevertheless, it definitely emerged as a political response to colonialism and its competing ideologies: capitalism and communism. Mawdudi could not embrace either capitalism or communism for a host of reasons, so he looked to Islam for a political answer. He was the first to talk about Islam as a political entity, an ideology, a ‘complete code for life’, and he was the first to insist that the state must be controlled by a specific interpretation of sharia. Secondly, Islamism is decisively statist. All Islamist groups seek to implement sharia – and preferably their reading of it – as state law. To that end, they aim to control the mechanisms of government in Muslim-majority countries. Thirdly, Islamism is not a monolith. There exists a broad array of Islamist organisations. On the one hand are ‘liberal’ Islamist groups (relatively speaking) such as Ennahda in Tunisia and the AKP in Turkey, though one could hardly call them Islamist any more. On the other hand are more conservative and aggressive movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. Furthermore, Islamism is inherently competitive and confrontational. Within the Islamic community, Islamists believe that their interpretation of the faith is superior to other readings of it and that their followers are more pious than other Muslims. Internationally, Islamists believe that they are in conflict with the West and its allies. This

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particular expression of the confrontational mentality stems, in part, from what Professor Cook called the ‘Third World Predicament’. Islamists believe that it is a Muslim hereditary right to be the leading civilisation in the world. On this point, Bernard Lewis notes that historically, Muslims were not accustomed to being a political minority. Whether in Egypt and Syria during the seventh and eighth centuries or in Mughal India during the eighteenth century, Muslims were an elite political class that often governed a majority nonMuslim population. It has only been within the past 60 to 70 years that large numbers of Muslims have lived as minorities. In Western nations alone there are 30 million Muslims living as minorities. This is historically unprecedented, and it is still an ongoing process. Therefore, it has been difficult for Muslims to accept minority citizenship status. A fifth aspect of Islamism is that it desires Muslim unity under a caliphate in some form or another. I use the term ‘caliphate’ with caution because there are many modern understandings of what that institution signifies. There are groups such as al-Qaeda and Hizb alTahrir who want to reinstate a centralised medieval caliphate. On the opposite end of the spectrum are those such as Erdogan in Turkey who recently tweeted in Arabic that ‘the direction of prayer is one, the hour of prayer is one, the Qur’an is one, and we should be as one people’. Perhaps this neo-Ottoman vision for Muslim unity coming from Turkey’s more secular-leaning leader could challenge the understanding of the caliphate put forward by the Bin Ladens of the world. Another Islamist leader supporting this unity agenda is Khairat al-Shatir, the deputy guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He has repeatedly spoken about the al-Nahda project, or the renaissance project. He wants this Islamic ˙ revival to spread across the region. Across the spectrum, the impulse for unity is there and refuses to disappear. Lastly, Islamists believe that political sovereignty rests with God alone. Western politicians including Michelle Bachmann have echoed similar thoughts about God’s sovereignty in political matters through evangelical Christian ideas such as Dominionism. For most Islamists, popular or parliamentary sovereignty is an anathema because it robs God of his rightful authority. This notion of divine sovereignty, sı¯ya¯da as it is called in Arabic, is a modern concept contrived by Islamists as a response to European political thought.

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Salafism Salafism has become a subject of political debate once again, and I hope to explain what it is and why it has recently reemerged as a topic of conversation. I live in New York and often travel throughout the United States. In my encounters with Americans, I am amazed at the short memory of many today, for Salafism is not a new phenomenon. It is no different from what is known as ‘Wahhabism’, which was the number one issue being discussed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. After that tragic event, people asked: ‘What is it about Wahhabi ideology that led 19 men from a broadly Wahhabi background to attack the United States?’ This question was asked again in Britain four years later after the terrorist attacks of 7/7. The jihadism exhibited in these incidents is merely a violent (and marginal) expression of Wahhabism. Now, after the Arab Spring revolutions, people are wondering, ‘Who are these Salafis?’ Well, this movement is nothing more than a reincarnation or a rebranding of the old Wahhabism. Practising Wahhabis are generally offended by this moniker, because they do not wish to be named after one of the names of God, al-wahha¯b, nor do they want to be named after the founder of their school of thought, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Instead, these particular Muslims prefer to be called Salafis. In Arabic, salaf means predecessor, and in the Islamic tradition the Salaf al-Sa¯lihı¯n, which translates to ‘pious predecessors’, were the first three ˙ generations of Muslims. This is based on the Prophet Muhammad who said, ‘The best of generations is my generation, then those that follow them, then those that follow them.’ Therefore, the fact that the Wahhabis haven chosen to be called Salafis is telling. It indicates their obsession with the early Muslim community. This restorationist mindset can also be seen in certain Christian communities. But for the current discussion, the Salafi desire to emulate the original Islamic community demonstrates their very literalist outlook. This literalism is the first hallmark of the Salafist movement. The Salafis declare that Muslims should practise their faith in the same pure and pristine manner as that of the first three generations, the Salaf alSa¯lihı¯n. Salafism approaches Islam by divorcing it from over 1,400 years ˙ of nuance, poetry, metaphor, scholarship, and interpretation. Do the Salafis acknowledge the four commonly accepted schools of Islamic law? No. Do the Salafis accept that Shiʿi Muslims are believers? No. Do the

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Salafis allow for the veneration of saints and shrines as is done by the majority of Muslims around the world? No. I have previously been asked if Islam had ever experienced a reformation in the way that Christianity had. ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘It is called Wahhabism.’ But whether we call it Wahhabism or Salafism, it is first and foremost a literalist interpretation of Islam. Secondly, Salafism is rejectionist; it denies the validity of the practices and the beliefs of mainstream Islam. When it emerged in the eighteenth century, Wahhabism was a repudiation of the then normative Ottoman Hanafi Sunni Sufi version of Islam. Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of this movement, had travelled and studied in cities throughout the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, and possibly even Iran. He returned home disgusted by what he had seen, a dilution of his understanding of ‘pure, true Islam’ by Persian, Greek, and other influences. He was inspired to seek a more literal interpretation of Islam that he claimed would be more faithful to its original form. This attitude has inspired his followers to reject other Muslims, a mentality that still has repercussions today and can be seen in the attacks on Sufi shrines in Mali or the desecration of Shiʿi sites in Pakistan. Wahhabis are convinced that every other Muslim is wrong. Thirdly, Salafis place an enormous emphasis on ʿaqı¯da, which is translated into English as ‘creed’ or ‘doctrine’. The Salafis insist that the Islamic creed must be absolutely pure. It must not be polluted by any external doctrine – even though the ideas of ancient Greek philosophy inspired the early Muslim Muʿtazilite theologians and the modern concepts of Western political thought continue to resonate with Muslims today. The last prominent feature of Salafism is its preoccupation with the notions of shirk and bidʿa. Shirk is the belief in or worship of more than one God. For the Salafis, shirk is more than an adherence to polytheism or the Christian belief of the Trinity; it can manifest itself in the life of the ordinary Muslim who misses his prayers because he is working. The Salafi concludes that this Muslim has placed more importance on his work than on his duty to God, and therefore his labour has replaced his worship. The literalist mentality of Salafism means that shirk can be seen in every detail of one’s daily life. Furthermore, Salafis are obsessed with the notion of bidʿa. While the word bidʿa simply means ‘innovation’, for the Salafi it implies a ‘religious innovation’, something inherently

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negative. Anything that does not conform to Salafism’s narrow reading of scripture is bidʿa, and every bidʿa leads to Hell. This logic is again evidence of the literalism at the centre of the Salafi movement. These four hallmarks of Salafism ideology – literalism, rejectionism, obsession with doctrinal purity, and preoccupation with shirk and bidʿa – were born in Saudi Arabia. These ideas have been spread across the region and beyond, in part, because of Saudi sponsorship and petro dollars, but also because of the black-and-white appeal it has for many Muslims. I was in Tunisia and Egypt recently, and every time I go to these countries, I see a greater prominence of Salafism. The expansion of Salafism can be seen in the proliferation of satellite television channels dedicated to this ideology, the increasing number of imams who use Salafi rhetoric in their Friday sermons, the presence of Salafist groups on university campuses, and the growing popularity of prominent Salafi web portals. Aside from the allure of its ideological simplicity, Salafism is attracting new adherents because of practical reasons as well. Take as an example an average Egyptian man. He cannot get married until he is 35, because only then, if fortunate enough to find and maintain a wellpaid job, is he finally able to afford a house and a car and financially support his family. But, if you are a 19-year-old Salafi, you can arguably gain access to multiple wives for literally nothing, because that is what the Prophet’s people did. Early Muslims would go to a marketplace and propose to a woman. If she accepted the offer, she was pious. If she rejected the proposal, she was impious. And if she was not pious, then she would not be rewarded in the hereafter. This kind of literalist practice, prominent now in parts of Egypt, should not be dismissed as one of the draws of Salafi Islam. In this instance, it gives young Egyptian men free-licence to do whatever follows in a marriage without waiting to become financially independent.

Summary and Conclusion My penultimate point is this: Jihadism is nothing but a violent struggle to manifest a certain reading of sharia or a specific interpretation of Islam as state law. All of this rhetoric – from Qutb to Bin Laden, from al-Gemma’ al-Islamiyya to Jabhat al-Nusra – stems from this literalist understanding of sharia. Removing secular or less extreme Islamist

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governments in not their aim, but their means. The end is their form of strict caliphate state. Yet for every idea or notion that the Salafis or the Islamists advance from scripture, there also exists a counter-scriptural argument. Therefore, in order to respond to the threat of jihadism, one must not blame Islam and say that this problem is inherent to the faith. Rather, we must remember that the Islamist or Salafi interpretation of scripture is but one of many. While I cannot say that the literalist approach to the Qur’an is necessarily invalid, I can say with certainty that it is a minority reading, and it is often at odds with the scriptural interpretation of the majority of the Muslim community. Therefore, to undermine this extreme understanding of scripture and counter the jihadi narrative, the Muslim majority must reassert their reading(s) of Islam. Throughout the Middle East, certain governments have already attempted to use more normative Islamic interpretations to weaken jihadi rhetoric. And, by and large, these efforts have been successful. Prior to his ousting, Muammar Gaddafi, despite his many faults, was able to deradicalise (or at least disengage from violence) the Libyan Islamic fighting group by exposing them to a more mainstream reading of scripture. When presented with an alternative interpretation of Islam, these jihadis began to doubt the certainty of their cause. As this certainty weakened, their scriptural rigidity gave way to a more pluralist mindset. Saudi Arabia has implemented a similar initiative. So far, more than 8,000 jihadis have been placed in deradicalisation programmes. Interestingly enough, the Saudis are using mainstream Wahhabi thought – I recognise that this is a potential contradiction in terms – to undermine the more radical Salafis on the peninsula. And in Egypt under Hosni Mubarak, clerics from al-Azhar, the oldest functioning Islamic institution in the world, have gone to the prisons to deradicalise the more violent members of groups such as al-Gemaa al-Islamiyya. These mainstream Muslim thinkers have shared their approach to the Qur’an, their reading of the sunna, their interpretation of ijma¯ʿ, and their understanding of the four schools of law. So, as these brief examples show, the use of normative Islam to undermine radical ideology has happened, and it has worked. In conclusion, yes, there is a problem with extremism, fundamentalism, radicalism, literalism, Islamism, Salafism – whatever you want to call it – within Islam. However, the answers to this problem must also come from within Islam.

CHAPTER 5 JEWISH FUNDAMENTALISM Laura Janner-Klausner

Jewish fundamentalism is increasing at a galloping pace. It has two main forms – ultra-Orthodoxy; and the messianic aspirations of some of the Jewish settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories. The American sociologist Samuel Heilman offers a useful typology of Jewish fundamentalism in his seminal article, ‘Jews and Fundamentalism’,1 Heilman identifies two ‘phases’ of fundamentalism: the first is ‘active fundamentalism’, ‘in which the battle is waged “aggressively”, taken to the enemy who is to be completely obliterated’.2 These fundamentalists are messianists who believe that it is their sacred duty to engage in activity that will hasten the redemption. The second phase is ‘quiescent fundamentalism’. Its adherents believe that they own absolute truth from their inerrant text and their message will eventually triumph, but at the moment they should remain in ‘protected waiting’ insulated from the contaminations of the world. As they wait, they build physical enclaves and psychological fortresses around themselves. In his article, Heilman refers to these types of fundamentalism as ‘phases’, as he sees a progression between them in intensity. In contemporary Jewish society, however, these forms exist side by side and have some political synergy in the Israeli setting, as we will see later. Regrettably, we contemporary Jews have the dubious double pleasure of both burgeoning active and quiescent fundamentalists. The quiescent phase is best represented by the ultra-Orthodox (some use the phrase

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radical Orthodox) whilst the active fundamentalist energy is channelled through and by the minority of settlers in the West Bank of the occupied Palestinian territories who bring religious fervour to political Zionism. In addition to these two groupings, which I believe are the most influential, I will also refer briefly to one other group, an activist sector of the ultra-Orthodox world. The terms ‘Haredi Judaism’ or ‘Haredim’ are used frequently for ultra-Orthodox Jews, from the Hebrew, meaning ‘fearful’ which in this context refers to the image of ‘trembling in the face of God’. The growth of Haredi Judaism and of militant religious messianic Zionists is having an immense impact on Judaism and will shape it, possibly irrevocably, both in Israel and in the Diaspora. The focal points of the two groups are different, but they also converge. The inward-facing Haredim do not eschew political power to secure their way of life. For their part, the highly political settlers underpin their political conviction and activism with a fundamentalist reading of sources that they see as divinely validating the right and obligation of Jews to settle all parts of the biblically-promised Land of Israel. This survey starts by taking a closer look at the Haredi Jews who are a classic example of quiescent fundamentalism. They believe that they have unique access to the whole truth of the Hebrew Bible – the Torah – through their interpretations. To Haredim, all other forms of Judaism are wrong3 and furthermore, mortally undermine ‘authentic’ Judaism. Whilst the Haredim believe that their views of Torah and God hold the only correct view of Judaism, their emphasis is inward-facing. They posit that their mission is physically and spiritually to build their own communities, strengthening their relationship with God through continuous study and prayer. Haredi communities are united in their that their views and religious practices extend back in an unbroken chain to Moses and the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. Although Haredi communities have varied lifestyles as well as spiritual and organisational approaches to Judaism, they share a common view that they have a divinely commanded mission to hasten the Messiah’s arrival through a literal approach to Judaism and an emphasis on a lifelong, intensive total immersion by men in religious study. They believe that their views will triumph over those of the rest of the Jewish world and they will be those whose interpretation will be vindicated

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when the Messiah comes. Actually bringing about the Messianic age is only in God’s hands; in the meantime, they need to strengthen themselves rather than concentrate on anyone outside their immediate sphere. Haredim live in densely populated and highly homogeneous communities within tightly-defined boundaries – this proximity is essential for strict observance of the Sabbath during which travel is forbidden. They strongly discourage participation in secular education beyond gaining any instrumental benefit – such as transport, state welfare benefits or certain trades or skills that enable livelihoods that remain within the Haredi community such as computing, teaching and trading. Although outwardly it may look timeless, organised Haredi Judaism is in fact a relatively new phenomenon in Jewish history. It began as a reaction against the growth of Reform Judaism in central Europe in the nineteenth century and continued slowly to grow in the early twentieth century. Haredi Judaism was nearly decimated in the Holocaust as an extremely high percentage of the ultra-Orthodox communities were murdered throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. This is attributed to their obvious visibility due to their distinct dress code; their living in densely populated clusters; their passivity in the face of political threat. From this near destruction, there has been a robust resurgence in the Haredi communities in Israel and in the Diaspora over the last 50 years, powered by extremely high birth rates and very low dropout rates. In recent years, Haredi Judaism has also been strengthened by many in Orthodox Judaism becoming far stricter in their observance.4 There is a process of ‘Haredisation’ of mainstream Orthodoxy5 to such an extent that Michael Kress suggests that ‘Modern Orthodoxy is essentially dead’.6 This change is due to many factors. For example, traditionalist religious groups are aggressively and successfully proselytising for new members. Whilst Orthodox Judaism does not proselytise gentiles, it believes in kiruv (Hebrew: ‘drawing near’), which is the process of drawing non-observant Jews nearer religious Judaism, or Orthodox Jews towards Haredi Judaism. A Haredi lifestyle is easier to maintain than ever before in Jewish history through the existence of the state of Israel (despite deep Haredi reservations and antagonisms towards the state as a secular entity); technical mechanisms that enable a more stringent level of Sabbath observance; accessibility of religious books and some use of social media; and the availability of a wide variety of kosher food. There are an increasing number of young men and women from an Orthodox

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background in the Diaspora studying in religious seminaries in Israel for one to three years. The atmosphere of total immersion and day-long study result in more stringent practice and, as Michael Kress states, ‘when they return, these [young adults] are expressing ever-deeper discomfort with secular college life – socially because of the culture of sexual permissiveness and intellectually because of their discomfort with the academic teachings on subjects like the Bible and the nature and history of religion’.7 This has a knock-on effect on political views, with American Orthodox Jews overwhelmingly advocating right-wing Israeli policies, further to the right of mainstream Israeli opinion. Haredi Jews attempt to preserve the Jewish society that prevailed before the eighteenth century ushered in Jewish Enlightenment and the Emancipation, a society governed internally almost exclusively by Jewish law. This insularity was challenged by the Jewish Enlightenment (Hebrew: Haskalah), which took root in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, originating in central Europe. As part of a movement towards justifying political emancipation, the Haskalah advocated integration into wider European society and introduced extensive secular studies for the first time into education as well as Hebrew language and Jewish history, which were new foci for Jewish learning. The events of the Enlightenment and European Emancipation altered the nature of Jewish life in Europe beyond recognition, bringing Jews into the gentile and more secular spheres in an unprecedented manner. The majority of the Jewish population welcomed this change enthusiastically as it opened new economic, educational, and political horizons. However, Haredi Jews rejected the Enlightenment, seeing these changes as threatening the very core and permanencies inherent in Judaism. Haredi Judaism defines itself positively – as the ‘Judaism of the Torah’ – but also negatively, through its negative view of outside society and culture and its rejection of any intrinsic benefit in gentile, secular and Jewish nonHaredi cultures. Haredi communities increasingly became inwardfacing and developed a Fortress Judaism with no aspirations to impact on a wider gentile society and limited interest in influencing Jewish life, particularly in the Diaspora. Up to the present day, they stake out and sustain separate enclaves through vigorous defence and expansion of geographic boundaries, maintaining strictly separate eating, distinctive dress code, a separate language – Yiddish (a mixture of German and Hebrew), and their own, rabbinically-sanctioned mass media.

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Each of these physical manifestations of separation from mainstream Jewish and secular society reflects clear Haredi ideology. The level of separate eating laws extends ultra-Orthodox stringency to dietary laws and their implementation so that there are separate Haredi kosher certification systems with different, even stricter, guidelines and supervisors than those acceptable to and serving the mainstream Orthodox community. The distinctive dress code amongst the Haredi communities is a key element of identity separation and reinforcement. It not only distinguishes them from the gentile world but from other Jews. One of the means of distinguishing to which sect of Haredi Judaism a person belongs is through the subtleties of their dress code, though the united element of dressing is an emphasis on dress code adherence at all costs. All men grow the hair at the side of their heads into long locks and grow long beards, carrying out the Biblical command, ‘You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard.’8 Additionally, Haredi men wear distinctive colourless clothing – white shirts, a long black jacket, a black skull cap and, on the Sabbath, a fur hat and, a silk caftan. Women also have strict dress codes – covering their arms below their elbows and legs from an early age and when married, Haredi women not only cover their heads with a hat as Orthodox women do but never show any of their hair to anyone other than their husbands and so wear headscarves or wigs. In a very few communities, women shave their heads but this is extremely rare although often referred to because of the extreme nature of this means of ensuring modesty. As clothing is seen as key to identity, Haredi male dress codes represent both a rejection of modernity and a sanctification of older lifestyles. As well as positively adopting a strict dress code, those who do not dress in what is seen as modest clothes are condemned strongly and at times aggressively, especially women who are urged (by posters) to wear ‘modest’ clothing that covers their arms and legs in Haredi areas. After its decimation in the Holocaust, the Haredi population has found safe havens in Israel and the Diaspora and is thriving like never before. Very high birth rates and low dropout rates lead to a doubling of their population every 12 to 15 years and, at this trajectory, some demographic projections state that the majority of world Jewry will be Haredim by 2050.9 An illustration of how this manifests itself on a micro level is in the Haredi neighbourhood of Kiryas Yoel (New York) where out of 1,000

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women aged 20– 34, 730 will be pregnant today.10 This means women fall pregnant three months after they give birth and repeat this cycle so that Haredim have the largest families in the United States, with an average of six to seven children.11 In the United Kingdom, the Haredi community accounts for about 15 per cent of the Jewish population, with around 60 per cent of the Haredi community aged below the age of 18. Nearly a third of UK Jewish schoolchildren in primary school are Haredi already. This proportion will grow inexorably, since three out of every four children that are born within the Jewish community in the United Kingdom are now born into the Haredi community.12 There is virtually no secular education in British Haredi schools, particularly after the age of 14. Depending on the nature of the Haredi faction, some people’s English is so limited that they cannot converse in English beyond simple vocabulary. In Israel, the ultra-Orthodox population currently accounts for 8 per cent of the total population; with current trends indicating that they will be 20 per cent by 2030.13 To quote Israeli journalist Leslie Susser, ‘No government will be able to go on making welfare payments to such vast numbers of unemployed Haredim and continue to fund basic social and defense needs. The economy will simply collapse.’14 A key focus in the Israeli general election of January 2013 was the ‘burden on the majority of population’ imposed by Haredi Jews’ extensive reliance on the state benefit system for housing benefit; unemployment benefit and child benefit in addition to the incendiary issue of Haredim not serving in the army. It is interesting that as Haredi girls are often the only breadwinners, they may receive a better secular education than boys. Women’s work can enable their husbands to devote themselves to full-time and lifelong religious study. At the same time, girls are excluded from learning the majority of religious texts. The Haredi lifestyle is cemented by the early age of marriage, men at about 19 and women at about 18. Couples then have children as soon as is possible. As there is a complete separation between men and women, matchmakers are used to identify partners. These are not forced marriages but arranged – they will meet their potential partner once or twice before the engagement and could object to the match if they want. Within the Haredi world, history contains clear themes – exile and return; sin and consequent punishment; repentance and redemption.

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The Haredi view of history is dominated by three key events – ‘Sinai, Shtetl and Shoah’. In the vernacular these are, respectively, the revelation of the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai;15 the centuries of self-contained life in the villages of Europe; and the Holocaust. Proximity to Sinai confers authority – so the older a text or an opinion, the harder it is to question it. The Shtetl has been greatly romanticised, focusing on a longing for a closed, self-governing society and forgetting the extent of poverty and anti-Jewish riots (pogroms). The Holocaust is the driving force propelling the desire to ‘replenish’ the devastation wrought to the Jewish demographic and consequently, spiritual damage done to world Jewry by the Nazis. Theologically, the Holocaust is seen by many in the Haredi world as a form of divine retribution for the Emancipation. Many Haredi rabbis propose that the Emancipation gave the Jews of central Europe an unprecedented choice – whether to be part of Jewish society or not. Those who chose to move away from traditional Judaism brought on cataclysmic divine retribution. A key distinction between streams of Haredi Judaism is their varying attitudes to Israel. At one end of the spectrum are the numerically tiny but impactful, Neturei Karta (Aramaic: The Guardians of the Gate), who are strongly anti-Zionist, visible if not notorious for some of their anti-Israel stunts.16 At the other end of the spectrum are groups that collaborate with the Israeli state and are involved in parliamentary politics. Within the Israeli Parliament – the Knesset – that was elected in January 2013, 18 of the 120 members are from the two Haredi parties – the Sephardic Shas and the Ashkenazi United Torah Party. They exploit the mechanisms of statehood pragmatically to promote their vision, to direct state education funding to their institutions and defend their exemption from military service. They claim that the world is spiritually and existentially sustained by their continual Torah study. Torah study protects the nation, existentially sustains the universe and is a holy task that should be supported economically and is as valid a means of protecting the country as army service. They also seek to dominate state-sanctioned institutions providing Jewish religious services such as the religious courts that rule on matters of personal status – divorce, marriage and conversion, all of which are regulated only through the monopoly of the Orthodox religious authorities. Haredim in Israel see themselves as the real Jews, internally exiled within the secular Zionist

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state. They believe that the only proper Jewish state is the one that will be brought about by the arriving of the Messiah. There are currently 60,000 Haredi men in Israel who are legally exempted from military service, which is notionally compulsory for most citizens. The original exemption was granted to the Haredi community to enable full-time study in the wake of the decimation caused by the Holocaust. When the prime minister of the newly-formed State of Israel, David Ben Gurion, granted the exemption it applied to just 400 scholars. Now the Orthodox rabbi, Dov Lipman, is trying to bring Haredi young men into the military in separate units without women commanders and with separate prayer schedules and training. The Washington Post reported that there has been considerable outrage and even death threats aimed at Lipman for saying these things.17 In response to criticism, Lipman quotes the leading eleventh century Jewish scholar, Moses Maimonides who ‘says that anyone who chooses the Torah and does not contribute is a person who has disgraced and brought shame to the Torah and will have no place in the world to come’. Alongside avoidance of military service, another source of tension between the Haredi and general population is the low rates of participation in the workforce of Haredi populations and very high dependence on state benefits. This is partly due to the lack of mainstream education of the Haredi population and partly commitment to full-time study (for men) and large families (impacting on women’s opportunity to work for a wage). In the most recent general election of 2013, the lack of Haredi participation in the workforce and the army was a key factor in impacting on voting patterns. To conclude, the quiescent fundamentalists are sitting in waiting, but they are far from static. The Israeli sociologist Yosef Shilhav referred to their communal-political dynamics as ‘Expansionism through Insularity’.18 In contrast, our second type of fundamentalists shun insularity for active, sometimes aggressive, engagement. I will now turn to the ‘Active’ type of fundamentalist Judaism, of which I will refer to two main forms: the Chabad-Lubavitch sect; and militant Messianic Orthodox Zionists. Like the Haredim, both groups believe they have a duty to hasten the arrival of the Messianic age. In stark contrast with the Haredim, however, both believe in engaging with the wider world and actively seeking to make converts to their causes.

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The Chabad-Lubavitch sect is a form of Hasidic Judaism, an eighteenth-century movement that promoted spirituality through Jewish mysticism and an emphasis on joyful prayer. Hasidic Judaism is organised into sects, which tend to follow rabbinic dynasties. The Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim are followers of the dynastic leader, the Rebbe of Lubavitch, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994. They believe in dynamic, wide-ranging and even daring outreach in order to bring all Jews closer to Orthodoxy. They have a global network of educational institutions and emissaries who often represent the only organised Jewish presence in their regions around the world. Lubavitch followers see it as their mission to draw people into Judaism as a way of hastening a Messianic age. Many followers believed that Rebbe Schneerson was indeed the Messiah, and the personality cult around him continues even now, two decades after his death. Also in the business of hastening the arrival of a Messianic age are the activist religious Zionists who live in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank of the Jordan, which Israel has occupied since the 1967 Six-Day War. The term ‘West Bank’ itself has been superseded by the biblical ‘Judea and Samaria’ in the language of the militant settlers which has spread to official government terminology. This messianic Zionism is activist fundamentalism – a messianic theology that legitimises and encourages human intervention in Israel’s destiny. It is future-orientated as the settlers and their followers believe that they can precipitate a utopian society based on God’s rule. However, unlike Haredim, they do not reject modernity but rather, selectively integrate modernity into their ideology and modus operandi. Elements of religious Zionism interpreted Israel’s capture in the 1967 Six-Day War of the West Bank of the Jordan as divine confirmation of the Jewish people’s renewed claim to the Land of Israel. Orthodox Judaism was uncomfortable with secular Zionism and the idea of normalisation and self-determination along with other secular nation states, but – sometimes begrudgingly – accepted modern Zionism as a steppingstone to redemption, with Zionists playing – perhaps unwittingly – a role in a wider divine design. The formula for reconciling Zionism and Orthodox Jewish views of national revival were articulated in a definitive manner by Rabbi Yehuda HaCohen Kook,19 who referred to the state as a divine miracle and the ‘Beginning of Redemption’. The idea of the independent state as a ‘miracle’ cleverly appropriates the human and

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political agency that the Zionist movement attributed to itself, without rejecting the outcome. The formula also successfully contained many young people within Orthodox Judaism, which a binary choice between Haredi Orthodoxy and secular Zionism would have failed to do. The victory of the Israeli armed forces against overwhelming odds in 1967 was seen as another miracle and with the return to the Biblical Land of Israel, Orthodox religion and Zionism could be forcefully realigned through active settlement in the ‘Liberated Territories’. The settler movement took root following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, with the foundation of the Religious Settler Movement ‘Gush Emunim’ – ‘the Block of the Faithful’. It aims to redeem the biblical Land of Israel through settling the land. The key differentiation here is between the messianically-driven settlers and the overwhelming majority of Jews who live in the territories because that is where successive governments made mass housing available cheaply, mainly on the periphery of major cities such as Jerusalem in order to boost areas that were seen as strategically important for national security. The ideological settler movements, particularly those underpinned by fundamentalist approaches to religious Judaism, reproduced the frontier experience of early Zionist pioneers of the nineteenth century. They see their settlement activity as religious activism along a divinely ordained path, hastening the coming of the Messiah by settling land near Jewish holy sites, such as Hebron and Nablus in the heart of the Occupied Territories. There are worrying signs that holders of this ideology are becoming part of societal mainstream, to an even greater degree than the Haredim. The Haredim are prominent in politics, but the settler zealots and their sympathisers are not only involved in politics, they are also becoming prominent in the Israel Defence Force. Over the last 15 years, the proportion of religious settlers in the army in key strategic fighting units has increased significantly.20 This increase in settlers in key army units impacts not only on the political ideology of key fighting units towards the settlements but also on attitudes to religious life within the army. For instance, Elyakim Levanon, the rabbi of the West Bank settlement of Elon Moreh, was quoted as saying that the Israeli Defence Force soldiers should choose death rather than remain at events that include women’s singing.21 Although the ideological settlers are the minority of Jews living in the Occupied Territories, I believe they are disproportionally dangerous

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to Israel. At least some of them, led by fundamentalist rabbis, do not see themselves beholden to the Israeli government or the rule of law.22 They debate the religious injunctions to disobey the secular law, and adding to this potent brew of militant messianism is the fact that they are armed with weapons given to them either to protect their settlements or for individual self-defence. Some militant messianic fundamentalists, motivated by the idea of bringing salvation through radical action, have attempted to destroy the Dome of the Rock. Another, Dr Baruch Goldstein, committed the 1994 massacre of Muslim worshippers in the Cave of the Machpelah in Hebron.23 Recently, there has been an escalation in violence against Palestinians by a group called ‘Tag Mechir’, Price Tag. This price tag is paid by Palestinians in retribution by settlers and their sympathisers for actions by Palestinians, the Israeli government or the army deemed to be ‘anti-settler’. According to the UN, attacks by settlers on Palestinians and their property, mosques and farmland rose 144 per cent between 2009 and last year.24 There are groups of Israelis, such as Rabbis for Human Rights,25 who protect Palestinians and intervene with the military and legal authorities on their behalf. Over the last decade, the two elements of Jewish fundamentalism reviewed in this chapter have joined forces in a potent and toxic way – to promote racist ideas of an Arab-free Greater Land of Israel. UltraOrthodox Rabbis and militant settlers have formed an alliance, which leaves traditional Zionism with its emphasis on gradualism and pragmatic compromise far behind. The examples of Jewish fundamentalism – representing the categories of quiescent and activist fundamentalism – form a formidable challenge to the post-Emancipation Jewish status quo. This status quo is based upon embracing secular law, equality before the law and acceptance of the prevailing separation of religion and state. The state of Israel has always strained between these post-Enlightenment principles and more fundamentalist interpretations of its Jewish nature, held by a significant minority of its citizens. The pivotal question now is whether the pendulum is about to swing irrevocably in the fundamentalist direction. Put another way, the question is, can the fundamentalists sustain their advances? Assessing this means looking at political and economic influences, as well as the inter-relation between what happens in Israel and the Jewish worldwide Diaspora. For the Haredi world the question is one of economics and the ability to deploy political power to protect

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economic and social privileges. In Israel, there are clear signs that the Haredi communities and their political leaders may have over-reached. The current coalition is rare in Israeli politics in having no Haredi representation or support, reflecting the strong performance of the newcomer ‘Yesh Atid’ (translation – ‘There is a future’) party – strongly secular and middle class. Yesh Atid came to power on the promise of ‘sharing the burden’ and promised to impose on Haredim similar rules to those that apply to the wider community – impacting on school curriculum; level of social security entitlements; housing benefits and military service. Not all that this party promised will be delivered, even though its leader has become finance minister, but there is a sense in the political system that the days of Haredi carte blanche are over. A new dynamic was already emerging, albeit slowly and on the margins, of greater Haredi participation in the workforce. Women are a key and have been quietly demanding and gaining access to more sophisticated jobs, with men following suit. Major non-profit organisations, supported by the state and Jewish philanthropists, have for some years invested heavily in improving the employability of Haredim and the point of economic equilibrium for this community seemed to be moving towards somewhat greater self-sufficiency. Ironically, the Yesh Atid-led political attack on perceived Haredi privileges is creating a backlash – very visibly and aggressively against the small number of young Haredim who have joined specially-adapted units of the Israel Defence Force. Israeli politics are very volatile so it would be foolhardy to assert that the balance has shifted irrevocably; what is clear is that the limits of Haredi influence – and the tolerance of wider society towards it – have been tested in an unprecedented manner and have generated a very lively debate about the way Israel will look in the decades to come; this debate may well impact profoundly on future political choices made by Israeli citizens. The same debate, about Haredi influence on Jewish life, extends to the Diaspora as well. Here the question does not revolve around the control of state institutions and the overturn of the post-Enlightenment paradigm, but rather the ability of diversely Jewish communities to sustain their institutions as the demography shifts towards the Haredi groups. The figures quoted above on the split of entries to Jewish primary schools in the United Kingdom demonstrate the issue; the question of long-term sustainability is exacerbated by the fact that Haredi philanthropists are very unlikely to support mainstream communal institutions.

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On a more personal rather than communal and political level, there are signs that Haredi young people are finding new ways to navigate between the closed world of their communities and the opportunities of the wider world around them; the internet has a major disruptive influence on the status quo. The ‘dynamite in the pocket’ is the smartphone, providing discreet personal internet access. Many Haredim, we are told, have a ‘dumb phone’ for use in public and a smartphone alongside it. There has been a recent increase in Haredi networks on Facebook where men and women use pseudonyms to relate to each other and to the non-Haredi world as well as an increase in Haredi women phoning hotlines to get help with domestic violence and alerting to issues of gender segregation. These changes in individual behaviour are not leading to a mass departure from Haredi communities, but may be contributing to the development of a different relationship between this fundamentalist community and the world around it. Within its quiescent fundamentalist paradigm – perhaps accurately characterised as ‘passive aggressive’ – there are signs that new and different patterns of permeability are developing. For the activist fundamentalists of the settler movements, the political and territorial gains have been almost uninterrupted since 1973. In a political masterstroke, the same 2011 Israeli election that isolated the Haredim also saw the National Religious community move into greater political influence – achieved by sharpening the contrast between their Zionist loyalty and the Haredi approach. Creating common ground with secular parties – especially the aggressively secular Yesh Atid – to isolate the Haredim enabled the national religious block with its strong presence in two key parties – Likkud Beytenu (the party of Prime Minister Netanyahu) and HaBayit Hayehudi (The Jewish Home – the latest branding of the historic Zionist National Religious Party) to shift the key political battleground away from the Palestinian issue. The Israeli Right has for years maintained that there is no solution for the Palestinian conflict and the best that can be done is to manage it; the war-weary but economically successful Jewish Israeli community seems content to go along with this assertion, enabling the settlers and their supporters to be part of a wide political consensus. The HaBayit Hayehudi party controls two ministries that are key to supporting the settlers in the Occupied Territories – the Ministry of Housing and the Ministry of Economic Affairs – the latter decides on

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tax breaks for preferred geographic regions and the former allocates funds to housing development and communal infrastructures. For the settlers and their supporters, the moment of truth will come if there is serious discussion and resolve to evacuate them in order to advance a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. The first test will be whether they have the capacity to block such a proposal in the Israeli parliament and in public opinion. The far right in Israel has over the years passed laws that will make it harder for any government to agree a significant territorial compromise. The question now is whether the political influence of the settlers is such that no Israeli government will muster the will to even attempt to impose an evacuation. If a territorial compromise were offered and accepted it would probably require a majority in a referendum. In past evacuations such as from the Gaza Strip in 2005, settlers did not resort to the use of firearms against the army and the will of the government prevailed. While a referendum requirement may make it more difficult to get an agreement on territorial compromise, if such a peace agreement were ratified in a plebiscite it may make it harder for the settlers to gain support for violent resistance. That said, there is little question that if a plebiscite were to vote in favour of a withdrawal, the fundamentalist right would challenge its legitimacy on the grounds that Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens have no right to vote on handing over parts of the historic homeland of the Jews. This accusation of illegitimacy was already directed at Prime Minster Rabin when his minority government, held in place by the support of Arab parties in the Knesset, signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1993. Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish fundamentalist determined to halt any process of compromise. What this review shows is how influential the Jewish fundamentalists have become in shaping the possible futures for Jewish communities and Jewish civilisation as a whole, despite their relatively small numbers. Their strength in Israel, where they can use the mechanisms and resources of the state, amplifies their voice in the Diaspora as well. In the Diaspora and especially the United Kingdom which is a relatively small community with a strong link to Israel, the Haredi future seems set to dominate the community’s future in the coming decades. The accommodation between messianic and pragmatic; theocratic and liberal; ethnocentric and pluralistic that has characterised the Jewish

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world for 150 years and the state of Israel for its first 65 years seems on the verge of significant change with the fundamentalists on the ascent.

Notes 1. S. C. Heilman, ‘Jews and Fundamentalism’, Jewish Political Studies Review 17:1 – 2 (Spring 2005). 2. Ibid. 3. See D. Finkelstein, ‘It’s courage versus arrogance in the Mirvis Limmud Row’, The Jewish Chronicle (17 October 2013). 4. M. Kress, The State of Orthodox Judaism Today (Jewish Virtual Library, 2012), p. 1. 5. Also see H. Soloveitchik, ‘Rapture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy’, Tradition 28/4 (Summer 1994). 6. Kress, The State of Orthodox Judaism Today, p. 1. 7. Ibid. 8. Leviticus 17:21. 9. Professor Sergio Della Pergola, Hebrew University, in American Jewish Yearbook, 2012. 10. S. M. Cohen, J. B. Ukeles and R. Miller, Diverse Jewish Communities (UJAFederation of New York: Berman Jewish policy archive, 2012). 11. J. Halberstam, ‘Lives of the Ex-Haredim’, Jewish Ideas Daily (2 August 2011). 12. D. Graham, 2011 Census Results (England and Wales) Initial Insights into Jewish Neighbourhoods (London: Institute for Jewish Policy Research, 2013). 13. Central Bureau of Statistics in Israel, 28 March 2013. 14. Jerusalem Report, 11 March 2013. 15. Exodus 20. 16. www.nkusa.org (accessed 11 March 2015). 17. S. Quinn, ‘A rabbi’s call to draft Israel’s ultra-Orthodox into military service’, Washington Post (16 September 2013). 18. Y. Shilhav and M. Friedman, ‘Expansionism through Insularity: the Haredi Community in Jerusalem’ [Hebrew] ‫ הקהילה‬:‫התפשטות תוך הסתגרות‬ ‫( החרדית בירושלים‬Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 1985). 19. D. Samson and T. Fishman, Torat Eretz Yisrael (Jerusalem: Torat Eretz Yisrael Publications, 1991). 20. D. Ephron ‘Onward, Jewish Soldiers’, Newsweek (20 November 2010). 21. K. Nahshoni ‘Troops will die rather than listen to women’, YNet (11 November 2011). 22. M. Parks, ‘Israeli Rabbi Urges Troops to Disobey Army’, Los Angeles Times (20 December 1993). 23. www.princeton.edu/, achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Baruch_Goldstein.html (accessed 11 March 2015). 24. www.un.org (accessed 11 March 2015). 25. rhr.org.il/eng/ (accessed 15 March 2015).

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Bibliography Cohen, S. M., J. B. Ukeles and R. Miller, Diverse Jewish Communities (UJA-Federation of New York: Berman Jewish Policy Archive, 2012). Ephron, D., ‘Onward, Jewish Soldiers’, Newsweek (20 November 2010). Finkelstein, D., ‘It’s courage versus arrogance in the Mirvis Limmund Row’, The Jewish Chronicle (17 October 2013). Graham, D., 2011 Census Results (England and Wales) Initial Insights into Jewish Neighbourhoods (Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), 2013). Graham, D., J. Boyd, and D. Vulkan, 2011 Census Results (England and Wales): Initial Insights about the UK Jewish Population (Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), 2012). Graham, D. and D. Vulkan, Population Trends among Britain’s Strictly Orthodox Jews (The Board of Deputies of British Jews, 2008). Halberstam, J., ‘’Lives of the ex-Haredim’, Jewish Ideas Daily (2 August 2011). Heilman, S. C., ‘Jews and Fundamentalism’, Jewish Political Studies Review 17:1 –2 (Spring 2005). Holman, C. and N. Holman, Torah, Worship and Acts of Loving Kindness: Baseline Indicators for the Charedi Community in Stamford Hill (London: Interlink Foundation, 2002). Kress, M., The State of Orthodox Judaism Today (Jewish Virtual Library, 2012). Nahshoni, K., Troops will die rather than listen to women’, YNet (11 November 2011). Parks, M., ‘Israeli Rabbi Urges Troops to Disobey Army’, Los Angeles Times (20 December 1993). Quinn, S., ‘A rabbi’s call to draft Israel’s ultra-Orthodox into military service’, Washington Post (16 September 2013). Samson, D., and T. Fishman, Torat Eretz Yisrael (Jerusalem: Torat Eretz Yisrael Publications, 1991). Shilhav, Y., and M. Friedman, ‘Expansionism through Insularity: The Haredi Community in Jerusalem’ [Hebrew] ‫ הקהילה‬:‫החרדית בירושלים התפשטות תוך הסתגרות‬ (Jerusalem, Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 1985). Soloveitchik, H., ‘Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy’, Tradition, Vol. 28, 4 (Summer 1994) 1994).

CHAPTER 6 HINDU FUNDAMENTALISM Julius Lipner

As James Dunn has shown in Chapter 1 of this volume, the term ‘fundamentalism’ arose in a Western, Protestant evangelical context at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century.1 All sorts of methodological considerations – and warnings – are in order if one wishes to transfer the term to a non-Christian, south Asian tradition, such as Hinduism. Nevertheless, in contemporary parlance the term is used to indicate a mentality, or point of view, or attitude, or course of action in contexts that outstrip that of its origins, and I propose to exploit this terminological flexibility in this essay. By ‘fundamentalism’, then, I refer to an approach undergirding a way of life, based on the ideological reading of a source text (or corpus of texts),2 which affirms that only one understanding of that text, whether taken in part or in sum, is viable or true, irrespective of any other factors of interpretation that may be brought to bear, such as reason, tradition, scientific and other empirical discoveries of one sort or other, the so-called wisdom of other faiths and philosophies, and so on.3 It is important to add that such an approach must be implemented in an adversarial manner, so that dissenters are relegated to a position beyond a divide that cannot be bridged except by way of (at least substantially) uncompromising assent on the part of those who have been excluded. I regard this as a ‘closed’ form of interpretation in so far as this interpretation is not allowed, in theory at least, to undergo any kind of change that deviates substantially from the original understanding of the

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perceived ‘fundamentals’ of the text(s) concerned. Any change of understanding that may occur is regarded at most as marginal or secondary. The effect to the observer outside this interpretive circle is of an approach that is, overall, unreasonable, unbalanced and ‘closed’. Notwithstanding the origins of the term in question, this definition does not confine its application to religious contexts; it may apply too to non-religious texts such as the constitution of a state or organisation, and so on. We are now confronted by a different terminological problem: the denotation and connotation of the terms ‘Hinduism/Hindu’.4 As all working in the subject-area know, defining these terms eludes general consensus, but this does not mean that we cannot use them, for despite their having ‘fuzzy edges’ semantically, it is generally agreed that these terms have a wide enough range of uncontested and incontestable uses; besides, their general use gives Hindus a voice amid the forum of other religio(-cultural) voices, such as those of the Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew, Sikh, etc. Desuetude of the words ‘Hinduism/Hindu’ would emasculate a great many people in the affirmation of the identity that pertains to the global interchange of news, information, allocation of resources and so on in the political, social, economic, religious, historical (and other) spheres. And there is the salient fact that a great many individuals identify themselves as ‘Hindu’, and insist on the name. Indeed, one of the points I shall be making in this essay is that it is a common project among certain kinds of Hindu fundamentalists themselves, implicitly or explicitly, to recommend their own definition of these contentious naming words. To a definition of ‘Hindu’ by (some) Hindu fundamentalists, we shall come in due course. I now wish to focus, more clearly, the scope of our inquiry with respect to the kinds of Hindu fundamentalism we shall consider: for want of more precise terms, these may be broadly described as ‘scriptural’ and ‘political’ (though this does not mean that either kind does not include some reference to the content that the other emphasises). We can start our discussion by noting, with others in this volume, that fundamentalism as such is a ‘modern’ phenomenon. But this statement is not easy to decode. Does this mean that what may count for ‘fundamentalist’ approaches today did not have antecedents in our traditional societies of the past, not least in societies that we may describe as ‘Hindu’? As a ‘modern’ phenomenon, can ‘fundamentalism’

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in one form or other have no (pre-modern) historical precedent? What does it mean to ascribe the description ‘modern’ to ‘fundamentalism’ as a concept? In his essay, Dunn points out that the early twentieth-century publication-project of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles adverted to earlier was undertaken to defend ‘the orthodox beliefs of Protestantism, indeed of Christianity’, viz. the Virgin Birth, Resurrection, and Deity of Christ, the creation of the world by God, etc., derived from a literal reading of the Bible, against, inter alia, attack from the Liberal Protestant approach emanating from Germany that subjected the Bible and these putative truths to the ‘scientific’ method of rational, historicist textual criticism.5 Thus, according to the authors of these booklets, at least, the hallmark of modernity6 was a universal reason informed by a scientific – historicist critique that was corrosive of the fundamentals or core beliefs of faith. Fundamentalism becomes a retreat into a notion of faith that provides inerrancy and certainty against an undermining use of reason that is supposed to have universal applicability. This mentality springs from a desire ‘for a firm rock in a sea of otherwise constant change, for [truths] unchanging in the face of so-called “progress” with its seemingly endless confusion and dilution of moral standards’ (Chapter 1). We are in the realm of psychology here, but as Peter Herriot points out in Chapter 2 of this book, fundamentalism (of all kinds, one presumes) generates a distinctive mindset that seeks to avoid insecurity and uncertainty in circumstances of uncontrollable change of one sort or other. However, cast in such broad terms, this description does not represent only a modern mindset: there have always been elements in society the world over that have resisted the pace of change, not least in terms of challenges to the prevailing authorities. And traditional Hindu societies have been no exception. If, however, we specify that this change is wrought by rapidly globalising innovations in technology, and such factors as the irreversible march of rationalist, secularist ways of thinking, capitalist, industrialised economies, and democratic polities, then by definition ‘fundamentalism’ is a modern category. In a fine article entitled ‘Modernity’,7 Joseph Prabhu challenges the idea that we must understand the concept of ‘modernity’ in terms of the ‘cultural and philosophical hegemony of the West’. This understanding privileges a historicising Eurocentric consciousness of meta-narratives as

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a key factor of modernity, and demands that non-Western cultures follow suit ‘to earn the badge of “modernity”’. Prabhu points out that many non-western cultures, for one historical reason or other, for example interaction with colonial rule, had forged their own notions of modernity by means of various cross-cultural critiques (as an example, he considers that of Gandhi), so that they could come to terms with their own circumstances. He concludes: Modernity [. . .] is now made a global category affecting different cultures variously [. . .] The effect of these various critiques on the original model of Western modernity [. . .] is to rob it of both its exemplarity and its normativity.8 In this essay we shall consider how Hindus we dub fundamentalists today created their own versions of modernity; this occurred in a context of colonial rule and Western understandings of Hinduism. However, these constructions have been gradually confronted by a post-modern intellectual climate in which, in contrast to the sometimes facile universalisms and rationalisms of modernism, the emphasis is on the local, the fragmentary, the ambiguous, and the particular. Though ‘fundamentalism’ has been born from the womb of modernity, it finds itself confronted today in many ways by the exigencies of a post-modern environment. This makes its trajectory in various contexts all the more unpredictable, and prone to violence. It is from this nuanced point of view that we can now attend to our topic. I mentioned earlier that we shall consider two kinds of Hindu fundamentalism: (i) the ‘scriptural’ and (ii) the ‘political’, and that these descriptive terms serve only to emphasise content with respect to each other, not to unduly constrain it. Let us look at the scriptural first. This kind has a longer pedigree in the Hindu context than the political, and in its current form has become something of a laughing stock. One of its modern representatives has been the ‘historian’ Purushottam Nagesh Oak (1917– 2007), born in what was then the state of Indore, who claimed in his writings, inter alia, that both Christianity and Islam derived from ancient forms of Hindu belief, that the Vatican was originally a Vedic institution, that the Taj Mahal began its existence as a temple to Shiva before it was eventually transformed into a Muslim mausoleum, and so on.9 Many of these claims

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are based on a tendentious reading of historical material and a derisively spurious etymology, e.g. the name ‘Christianity’ comes from the Sanskrit compound krsna-nı¯ti, viz. ‘The justice/ethics of (the deity) _˙ _ Krishna’. This stance is ‘fundamentalist’ in terms of my definition in so far as it claims that the ancient Hindu canonical Sanskrit scriptures, the Vedas,10 are a guide for our reading of various historical data (texts, artefacts) in such a way that only one interpretation of these data is acceptable, viz. their Vedic origin, irrespective of a wealth of views and otherwise established evidence to the contrary. So much so that – it is claimed – it is incumbent on the Indian central and relevant state governments to accede to this interpretation and take the requisite ‘revisionist’ action, viz. change of public information and records, of history books, etc. (which demands have been rejected, of course, by the governments concerned). These views of Oak and his revisionist colleagues have been summarily dismissed by more orthodox scholars of Indian culture and history; nevertheless, they continue to have a minority but still significant following among Hindus, not least among Hindus of the far right. The trajectory of this kind of Vedic fundamentalism, if I may call it that, goes back to the nineteenth century when much of India was under British colonial rule, either that of the East India Company or of the Crown. In his book Resistant Hinduism (1981), Richard Fox Young records a debate between a Scotsman, John Muir (1810– 82), a civil servant in the East India Company, and three Hindu apologists.11 In 1839, after he had been in India for over a decade, Muir published, in Sanskrit,12 the first edition of a polemical work, the Mataparı¯ksa (abbr. ˙ MP), (Test of [Religious] Views), which incorporated elements of a Paleyian rationalism and purported to identify the true religion on the basis of three criteria. These were firstly, the ability of the religion’s founder to work miracles that could be attested to by unimpeachable witnesses; secondly, the superior holiness of the religion’s scriptures; and thirdly, the religion’s universally salvific character. Not surprisingly, these three criteria were applied by Muir to make Christianity the true religion and Hinduism, in particular, false. Behind the scenes it was really a matter of a dominant faith seeking the justification of compliant reason, since Muir’s chosen criteria were the reagents of a solution in which the Christian faith was the intended precipitate. But what is interesting for our purposes is the role ostensibly assigned to reason in the work. Muir’s explicit starting

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point is not scriptural authority or faith. Rather, reason is set up as the impartial judge of the inquiry, and it is assumed that the application of the three criteria is rationally demonstrable.13 Note how Muir purports to establish the debate in what we may call a ‘modernist’ context, where the dictates of an impartial and universal reason were supposed to hold sway. The first two editions of the MP drew vigorous rejoinders from native ‘pundits’ ( panditas) or scholars versed in ˙˙ traditional lore, of whom one in particular is of special interest to us. This was Nilakantha Goreh (1825–85), a Citpavana Brahmin from Maharashtra, who had been brought up in Benares, a traditional stronghold of Hindu orthodoxy. His riposte was entitled: S´a¯stratattvavinirnaya (abbr. S´TV: ‘Determination of the Essence of Scripture’), and ˙ was written some time in 1844–5. The chief target of Goreh’s attack was precisely the relationship between faith and reason implied in the MP.14 The gist of Goreh’s defence of the Hindu approach (in effect, really the Veda¯ntic approach) was this: Reason [upapatti] but conforms to scripture [s´a¯stra], scripture does not conform to reason. Scripture is self-validating [svatah ˙ prama¯nakam s´a¯stram], whereas reason acts for the understanding ˙ ˙ of scripture [. . .] Thus those things set forth in the Vedas, Pura¯nas etc. are quite true; reason only serves to make them ˙ [better] known.15 Here reason’s role is to justify scripture from within the standpoint of faith, not to judge the truth of scriptural beliefs. Scriptural authority dominates. Faith leads reason by the hand, reason following as it may. Goreh repudiates Muir’s claim that the mark of the true religion is universality, and conformability to reason. On the contrary, he avers, such attributes are the sign of a false religion. The true religion is not based on truths that can be validated by reason: ‘Only in scripture is God [ı¯s´vara] made known, as also the meditations, sacrifices and acts relating to Him.’16 That is the whole point of scripture as a source of knowledge we can rely on (viz. a prama¯na).17 Consequently, Goreh criticises the ‘superior’ ˙ religion advocated in the MP (designedly innocent of the more recondite Christian doctrines) as ‘simple-minded’ (ba¯la¯dhigocara¯rthaka) and therefore ‘man-made’ (narair iva krta). In fact, on the matter of reason’s relation ˙ to faith, Goreh stands squarely in the classical Veda¯ntic tradition, for

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which the nature and existence of the Supreme Reality, infinite in its being and attributes, cannot be demonstrated by reason.18 For his part, Goreh was a scriptural fundamentalist in that the Hindu scriptures alone (primarily the Vedas) could give us determinate and incontrovertible truth about para-empirical realities such as God; no other alleged source of knowledge, including other (putative) scriptures, could epistemically challenge this truth. It is only the Hindu sacred texts, based on a right reading of the Vedas, that give humans the most worthwhile knowledge possible: the means to and nature of salvation (moksa). ˙ Later in the century, another figure went a step further in his claims for the Vedas as a source of knowledge. This was a Brahmin from Kathiawar called Dayananda Sarasvati (1824–83)19 who maintained that the Vedas provide the blueprint not only for all religious truth, but also for all scientific discoveries; as a repository of all truth, they yield ‘the totality of knowledge’.20 In the Golden Age of Vedic India, Dayananda affirmed, ‘vehicles were propelled mechanically by the combination of fire, water, wind, etc.’21 [T]he Vedas were [. . .] the repository of scientific truth [. . .] Some texts [of the Vedic corpus] were shown to propound the theory of the relatively new process of telegraphy, and others were said to explain the principles of mechanical locomotion by means of steam and electricity over land, water, and by air.22 This scientific knowledge was lost after the post-Vedic but still ancient cataclysmic war recorded in the Sanskrit epic, the Maha¯bha¯rata, only to be rediscovered in modern times. For Dayananda, the argument for the inerrancy and cognitive comprehensiveness of the Vedas is straightforward: [I]f there were no single book that has its full logical justification within itself (svatah-prama¯na), then it would be impossible to ˙ ˙ decide the truth or untruth of all other books, because they disprove one another, and doubt could not be overcome. The Veda, being the wisdom of god, is svatah-prama¯na [self-validating], and ˙ ˙ therefore the touchstone of all truth.23 In our context, what completes the fundamentalist mindset is something like this: ‘I/My group can divine the mind of God/the text,

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for which there is but one reading – my/our own. We are right, and all (substantial) dissenters are wrong.’ The Swami did not live in an environment where it was generally known that sacred texts could be subjected to a historical–critical interpretation, as do his followers and sympathisers of present times.24 Nevertheless, even some of the apparently educated among these maintain that the ancient Vedic Aryans were familiar with at least the basics of what most people today think are modern scientific inventions, for example the aeroplane. Thus B. Bissoondoyal could quote in his book in 1979 from the Organiser of 6 October 1952, that ‘Vedic references to aeroplanes described eight kinds of machines in aeroplanes, all of which were electrically controlled’. It was on the basis of such ancient wisdom, he contends, that an inhabitant of Bombay (with some collaborators) constructed an ‘aeroplane’ in 1895 that ‘rose to a height of 1,500 feet and automatically landed safely’. Later, the machine was sold ‘to an English commercial concern’.25 The rest is history – or not, as may be. This kind of Vedic fundamentalism continues to have its advocates in India today, and exemplifies in salient fashion what I have called ‘scriptural’ fundamentalism in Hinduism. In Dayananda’s case, it was a ‘modern’ product in that (albeit rudimentary) modern notions of science were combined with the belief in the superiority of the ancient Hindu scriptures to produce a standpoint that exalted Hindus and Hinduism (in the face of subjection to colonial rule) so as to encourage the selfesteem deemed necessary to seek political self-reliance. This set up a number of sharp divides – between (a certain kind of) Hinduism and Christianity, between Hindus and non-Hindus (Christians, Muslims, etc.), between Hindus of one kind and Hindus of another, and so on – that sought to consolidate an ideology, and became potentially programmatic for various courses of action. The political goal here, in this kind of fundamentalism, is still inarticulate and somewhat oblique. Though espoused by a number from the far right as compatible with their political beliefs, it is not of itself political in nature, notwithstanding the fact that it may on occasion have political repercussions, as we have intimated. ‘Political’ Hindu fundamentalism, on the other hand, though it also has religious content and implications, has been a political beast almost ab initio, and it is to this more consequential form of Hindu fundamentalism that we now turn. Here I wish to do no more than give an idea of its

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modern origins and of what I regard as its chief characteristics, without going into the ramifications of its contemporary developments, political or otherwise. First, however, it is important to bear two facts in mind: (i) that in the global geo-political arena today, India is recognised as an emergent key player, pressed hard as it is on its northern flanks by two historically uncongenial powers, Pakistan and China, both of which like India have nuclear capability; and (ii) that Hinduism is by far the majority tradition of the land.26 So, from the viewpoint of the potential repercussions of political Hindu fundamentalism, the stakes are high. There is another consideration here. I have argued in a number of places,27 in common with other scholars, that traditionally at the heart of Hinduism lies a strategy for making sense of the world – of the disposition of space and time, of questions of ultimate concern, the reckoning of order (and disorder) etc. – that is essentially a decentralising one, in contrast to counterpart strategies of the so-called Abrahamic faiths. I have called this decentralising strategy ‘polycentrism’. Here is an example of what I mean with regard to a familiar feature of Hinduism, viz. the worship of deity through multiple forms (and images). The example is taken from the S´rı¯vaisnava tradition, which has a conception ˙˙ of the supreme deity that we may call ‘binitarian’, in so far as that deity manifests simultaneously through the divine persons of Visnu-Na¯ra¯yana ˙ ˙˙ and the Goddess S´rı¯-Laksmı¯: ˙ Visnu-Na¯ra¯yana manifests in various modes particular to time and ˙ ˙˙ place, e.g. as one avata¯ra or other, or as this or that persona through the image(s) resident in one temple or other, in accordance with his gracious will. The Goddess S´rı¯-Laksmı¯, the other person of the ˙ Godhead, has her own history and panoply of multiple manifestations. Yet the broad gamut of these secondary forms, which invariably have their own liturgies of worship, are expressions of the same Godhead, endorsing and reinforcing each other in a shared framework of divine salvific efficacy. Or, to put it more specifically in the language of polycentrism, the one transcendent invisible Godhead, itself composed of two personal centres in dialectical relationship, manifests concretely through individualized personae [e.g. Krsna, Ra¯ma etc. on Visnu-Na¯ra¯yana’s ˙˙ ˙ ˙ ˙˙ side, and Sı¯ta¯ and other figures, on S´rı¯-Laksmı¯’s side] that function ˙

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as interactive centres of shared grace and power within one and the same domain of S´rı¯ Vaisnava cultic practice.28 ˙˙ The point here is that the broad decentralising strategy exemplified above – a strategy intellectually receptive to the inclusion of fresh centres in the polycentric grids that constitute the whole, and so typical of traditional Hindu understanding of the world – is in direct contrast to the centralising strategy of Hindu fundamentalism, not least the salient kind of political fundamentalism that we shall consider in this essay. Indeed, that is the nature of fundamentalism per se, viz. to exhibit a centralising tendency, especially in the domain of ideas: there is only one cluster of ideas that has authority, only one way of interpreting them, only one axis of certainty – and this generates an exclusivist faith stance that results in a sharp divide between an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. The fundamentalism of which we speak began to coalesce as a major political force in independent India around an organisation called the Vishwa (sometimes ‘Vishva’) Hindu Parishad (abbr. VHP, variously translatable as ‘The Pan-Hindu Association’, ‘The World Hindu Council’, etc.) and its affiliates, in the 1980s. The VHP itself was founded in 1964 (and officially registered as a society in 1966). As its name indicates, its aim was to consolidate and marshal Hindu political power in terms of an assertive sense of Hindu identity that derived from the concept of ‘Hindutva’, which may loosely be translated as ‘Hinduness’ (to which we shall return). But the building blocks, conceptually and politically, for the Hindutva movement were fashioned much earlier, indeed from the time the Indian nationalist movement against British rule began to take shape in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, particularly in Bengal. Nor must we forget that: Hindu nationalism in most of its modern forms (including hindutva) is inconceivable without reference to contemporaneous Western contributions about ‘India’ and ‘Indians’ [. . .] [which] led to a dominant view of vedic Aryanism as the original fount for the beliefs gathered under Hinduism. Similarly, vedic Aryans were seen as the progenitor peoples for those who became known as Hindus [. . .] [so that] in colonial India an archaic civilizational vedic Aryanism became virtually ‘common sense’ for many Indian

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intellectual elites in their varied projects of patriotism towards empire, anticolonial nationalism, or communalism.29 The arrival of the Vedic Aryans in (northwest) India was assigned by these western scholars to some time in the second millennium BCE . The politically-charged atmosphere of the period was given broader popular impetus by Bankimchandra Chatterji (1838– 94), the doyen of Bengali literature at the time, especially in his last three novels, and particularly in the first of these, viz. A¯nandamath (abbr. AM, which ˙ was soon widely translated into other Indian regional languages);30 a particular twist in this religio-political novel was the inclusion of a certain kind of Muslim, together with the British, as the chief social and cultural ‘Other’ for Hindus.31 There can be little doubt that, more or less through a process of ‘mission creep’, the vanguard of the ‘Indian’ nationalist movement against British rule gave the impression that they were a Hindu faction. Admittedly, this perception was aided and abetted to some extent by Muslim leaders themselves, not least from the Muslim League (India’s main political mouthpiece representing Muslims in the run-up to independence), who dragged their feet when it came to co-operating with their Hindu counterparts in the struggle for a free India under the rubric of a single national identity. In general, the political and social ‘speak’ of the leaders of the nationalist vanguard (most of whom were Hindus) was not sufficiently attentive to Muslim sentiment.32 Consequently, it was easier for the separatists among the Muslim leaders to make their case for a separate homeland for Muslims in the subcontinent, where a huge Hindu majority could not ride roughshod over Muslim demands and sentiments; thus Pakistan (in both its original eastern and western sectors) was born. It was in this general atmosphere of a growing divide between factions of Hindus and Muslims in the subcontinent, a divide exacerbated from time to time by bitter riots between the two communities, that several right-wing Hindu voices rose to prominence. The Hindu Mahasabha, a militant Hindu organisation, was launched in the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century. Though it has not played a major role on the Indian political stage, the Hindu Mahasabha is important for our purposes because it was one of the first parties to formulate an ideology that sought to unite Hindus politically, culturally

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and religiously in the face of specifically Muslim (but also Christian) identity in the Indian context in contrast to the Indian National Congress party’s avowed non-communal secularist agenda, and also because it was out of this developing programme that a number of more significant active, militant Hindu voices subsequently emerged. In keeping with the implications of its name, an important feature of the Hindu Mahasabha’s manifesto (as indeed of other voices at the time) was the repudiation of the age-old caste practices pertaining to untouchability; on the face of it this was a major step, in the context of a militant nationalist agenda, towards the political unification of Hindus, all the more so when one considers the strong Brahmin influence that constituted the party’s original ideology. How effectively this repudiation of caste divisiveness was implemented at grassroots level is not strictly to our point. We wish to emphasise here a ‘collectivist’ way of thinking with respect to Hindu identity that was to reappear again and again in subsequent Hindu political fundamentalist approaches (and which was reinforced in other political contexts of mass mobilisation in the first decades of the nineteenth century, e.g. Gandhi’s regular summons to public demonstrations for one cause or other, though these latter were not confined to Hindus only). To some extent the Hindu fundamentalist programme of ‘collectivisation’ of Hindus goes against the vastly more narrow ‘them’-versus-‘us’ mentality of most Western and Abrahamic fundamentalist groupings. It is in the context of this ideological matrix that we may locate one of the Mahasabha’s later guiding lights, the militant Hindu nationalist, Vinayak Damodar (‘Veer’) Savarkar (1883– 1966). Savarkar became President of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1937, but already in 1923, while imprisoned in Ratnagiri jail for what amounted to an act of political extremism in British eyes, he wrote a groundbreaking tract for the ideology of subsequent Hindu political fundamentalism, entitled Essentials of Hindutva, which was republished in 1928 as Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? In explicating what he meant by Hindutva or ‘Hinduness’, Savarkar did not focus on Hindu commitment in its religious dimensions as a potentially uniting factor of Hindu identity. In fact, not surprisingly, he found Hinduism’s proverbial religious diversity divisive for his purposes, as he did the plethora of caste groupings and their discriminations.33 These religious and caste distinctions were to be

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collapsed into a sense of identity that focused on racial – cultural, geopolitical, and moral factors, based on a particular reading of Indian history. According to Savarkar, the Hindus were in essence one people, descended from the glorious, energetic and valorous ancient ‘Aryans’, with common cultural, ethnic and moral bonds, and destined to flourish within the bounds of what we may call a ‘greater India’.34 Thus there was a Golden Age to which Hindus could hark back for inspiration as a ‘nation’, for the Aryans of old soon ‘developed a sense of nationality’.35 In time, the whole land ‘from the Himalayas to the [southern] Seas [around “Ceylon”]’ was brought ‘under one sovereign sway’,36 and ‘Aryans and Anaryans knitting themselves into a people were born as a nation’.37 Thus there is no talk here of a Volk, of a people of one pure race; the language is more assimilative than that. But throughout there is a racial bias towards the original inhabitants of the subcontinent – post-Aryan – uniting to form the Hindu people/nation of which Savarkar speaks.38 The geographical boundaries of Savarkar’s vision are not clearly defined, but they would certainly include territory from the countries we now know as Pakistan and Bangladesh,39 a claim that Savarkar’s more extreme, contemporary followers emphasise in terms of the designation, ‘Akhil Bha¯rat’.40 In fact, a large part of Savarkar’s tract purports to be a historical analysis of how the Hindus from earliest times, after one reverse or another, again and again repulsed foreign attacks on their integrity as a people and as a civilisation within the bounds of the subcontinent. On each occasion a leader, more or less regional, cropped up to rescue the Hindus concerned from dissipation and to preserve the body politic. Towards the end of his analysis, Savarkar gives the following rather extended description of what Hindutva is and of what it means to be a Hindu: A Hindu [. . .] to sum up the conclusions arrived at, is he who looks upon the land that extends from [. . .] the Indus to the Seas as [. . .] his Fatherland, who inherits the blood of that race whose first discernible source could be traced to the Vedic Saptasindhus [seven rivers] and which on its onward march, assimilating much that was incorporated and ennobling much that was assimilated, has come to be known as the Hindu people, who has inherited and

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claims as his own the culture of that race as expressed chiefly in their common classical language Sanskrit and represented by a common history, a common literature, art and architecture, law and jurisprudence, rites and rituals, ceremonies and sacraments, fairs and festivals; and who above all, addresses this land [. . .] as his Holyland [. . .] as the land of his prophets and seers, of his godmen and gurus, the land of piety and pilgrimage. These are the essentials of Hindutva – a common nation [Rashtra], a common race [Jati] and a common civilization [Sanskriti].41 Note that this statement is meant to be assimilative as well as exclusivist. Savarkar includes the so-called dharmic religions of Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism and so on within his definition of Hinduness (a claim that many from these faiths would reject today); and he excludes from his definition’s purview such ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’ traditions as Islam and Christianity, both of which have a long history in India and which comprise, in Savarkar’s terms, part of the ‘non-self’ that stands in opposition to the Hindus’ ‘self’.42 He does not speak of first-class and second-class citizens of the Indian polity; his concern is to circumscribe what it means to be a Hindu. It was left to others who followed to contemplate this further step in a more politicised framework. Savarkar’s ideas about Hindutva were extremely important for the development of the general strategy of the Hindu political fundamentalism that prevails today. Almost all branches of this fundamentalism regard his criteria of Hinduness, duly reworked, as central constituents of their ideology, not least the VHP (the Vishwa Hindu Parishad), in whose shadow a number of the more active branches of this brand of fundamentalism operate today (often under the rubric of the ‘Sangh Parivar’ or ‘the Joint Family’, members of which include the RSS and the Bajrang Dal or youth wing of this nexus43). To obtain an insight into this perspective at large, let us now inquire briefly into the ideological groundwork of the VHP. Though the VHP counts for an organisation, with a publication that has acted as its mouthpiece (viz. the Hindu Visva, published in several languages, including English), here we shall treat it not so much as an organisation in its own right with a set of historical personalities, but as the representative of an ideological template which members of the Sangh Parivar could reconfigure to suit

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their own objectives. In short, our concern is mainly with the basic Hindutva ideology of this so-called family network. The VHP rose to power in its function as a marker for the Hindu far right in the context of the running political problem that is the Kashmir issue (with its historical ambiguities), India’s poor showing in the SinoIndian conflicts, Muslim assertiveness and its fallout in connection with the petro-dollars of the Middle Eastern economies, and perceptions that the ruling Congress party of the time was cynically selling out Hindu interests to gain the Muslim vote, not to mention the gradual exacerbation of the political divides that characterised the background narrative of our earlier discussion. In this light, the criteria for Hindu collectivisation and mobilisation that shaped the founding ideology of the VHP can be reconfigured under the following three headings: the principles of Dharma or right order; the meaning of Sama¯j or the ideal Society; and veneration for Bha¯rat Ma¯ta¯ or the Motherland that is India.44 Firstly, the term dharma denotes an ancient Hindu concept bearing on the principles of right order and right living, with both descriptive and prescriptive connotations, and hence represents the ethical – cultural dimension of VHP ideology. Thus dharma tells one what is the case (e.g. it is the dharma or characteristic of fire to burn) as well as what one should do. In our context this means that dharma has an ideal or transcendent dimension that is the unchanging root of right order and right action to which all (not only Hindus) must defer (so Hindus can speak of sana¯tana or ‘eternal’ dharma), but when implemented empirically it is susceptible to contextual change and adaptation: Dharma is regarded as an eternal, universal, unchangeable principle. It is also regarded as a norm for social, as well as individual behaviour, and in this aspect it is not eternal, unchangeable or universal, but prescribes rules according to the situation.45 In consequence, VHP ideologues take recourse to the notion of gatima¯n dharma or ‘developing dharma’, dharma-on-the-go. Such conceptual flexibility is important, for it allows Hindutva strategy to adapt to circumstances, e.g. by allowing a greater role to women as circumstances are perceived to change (even though this ideology remains basically androcentric and gender-specific46). Though key

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characters of the great Sanskrit Hindu epic, the Ra¯ma¯yana in ˙ particular47 – such as Vishnu’s avatar, the brave Ra¯ma, who is protective of his kingdom and of his subjects; Sı¯ta¯, his spirited but devoted wife and the model of what it is to be a married woman; the simian figure, Hanuma¯n, ever energetic and solicitous of Ra¯ma’s and his loved ones’ needs, etc. – are given ideal status as exemplars of dharma, each in their own way, there is no engagement in Hindutva ideology with the doctrinal niceties or sectarian battles of Hinduism. There is a marked difference in this respect between the Hindu militant approach of which we speak and Abrahamic fundamentalisms. The exemplary characters of Ra¯ma, etc. (or indeed of any other figure that might be selected from Hindu religious history) are brought into play largely as motivating counters for moral or political action to create an atmosphere and achieve specific objectives of the VHP caucus. In this sense, the character of Sangh Parivar ideology is more secular-ethical than religious (see Savarkar). Nevertheless, there was greater scope, at least in the earlier decades of the VHP’s existence, for Hindu sa¯dhus or holy men – the so-called dharma¯ca¯ryas or ‘Teachers of dharma’ – to pronounce collectively on the implementation of Hindu dharma on one issue or other that cropped up for consideration by Hindutva leaders, than seems to be the case at present.48 However, the image of the Hindu holy man or woman – of which the saffron robe is a salient marker – continues to play an important part in Sangh politics. A well-known example is Uma Bhar(a)ti (1959– ), a senior activist of the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP, the most populous and influential political party of the Sangh Parivar. Her familiar saffron-clad figure was prominent in the agitation that led to the destruction of the Babri Masjid (Mosque) in Ayodhya on 6 December 1992 under the instigation of militant Hindu nationalists. ‘Definitely I take moral responsibility for whatever happened that day’, she is reported as saying in The Hindu national newspaper (24 November 2009, New Delhi edition). According to Hindutva ideologues, this event was Hindutva dharma in action. It is not accidental that the mosque was located on the site that these ideologues claim was also the birthplace of the avatar, Ra¯ma. In the political context, fundamentalisms of all stripes not infrequently lead to violence. Secondly, not only do the militant nationalists want a Hindu rashtra or nation state, they want it to be dominated by a Hindu Sama¯j or society.49 The concept of Sama¯j too has mystical and empirical

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connotations. In this vision, the demeaning, proliferating discriminations of caste and untouchability – which according to many ideologues were unwarranted accretions anyway – would be a thing of the past, but at least the four-fold order of varna (Brahmins or purveyors ˙ of wisdom and learning; Kshatriyas or rulers and protectors of polity; Vaishyas or entrepreneurs and business folk; and Shudras or functionaries of one sort or other) would remain in its ‘originally intended’ sense, that is as based not on birth but on the character and qualities of individuals.50 As in the case of Savarkar, this Sama¯j would include all the ‘dharmic’ faiths (Buddhism, Sikhism etc.) under an extended notion of ‘Hindu’. Indeed, in theory at least, even Indian Christians and Muslims seem to be eligible, provided they venerate India as their ‘holyland’ (see Savarkar), that is provided they conform as much as possible to Hindu dharma, to (Hindutva perceptions of) Hindu ethical and religious culture, as illustrated, for example in the nationally popular and extensive 1980s TV serials of the two ancient Sanskrit epics, the Maha¯bha¯rata and the Ra¯ma¯yana, where respect was shown for Hindu deities and festivals, and for ‘family values’ such as modesty in women and deference to elders, and for the sacredness of the cow, and where patriotism and loyalty towards ‘Bha¯rat’ was the order of the day. De facto, contend the Hindu militants, such conformity will never be possible for most Muslims and Christians, who have supervening allegiances to one foreign ideal or other (e.g. Rome, panIslamism, alien cultural values of dress, etc.), and so, provided they remain law-abiding, these can stay as Indians-on-sufferance in the ideal Hindu state. In effect, this will be a state of Hindudom, which in fact is a reincarnation of ‘Bha¯rat’ (see earlier) or Bha¯rat Ma¯ta¯. This leads us to the third and last criterion. Thirdly, this is the establishment of Bha¯rat Ma¯ta¯ or Mother India, which we have noted earlier also has both an ideal and an empirical dimension.51 Empirically, Mother India must continually strive to realise its ideal form as the only land where a person can be fully ‘Hindu’ in consonance with his or her individual dharma in an ideal Sama¯j. As we have indicated above, this hardly translates into a democratic polity in the full sense, where all citizens, even from the smaller minorities, are equally ‘children of the Mother’, and are accorded equal status in terms of their religious and other aspirations in the context of an egalitarian distribution of civil rights.

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Because Bha¯rat Ma¯ta¯ is viewed in its ideal form by Hindutva ideologues as some kind of organic entity, just as a real mother would be, the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan is treated as a dismemberment of sorts, requiring eventual reconstitution, even though, as noted earlier, the full territory of ‘Akhil Bha¯rat’ or ‘Undivided India’ is not clearly defined. Nevertheless, Mother India awaits the day when it will take its rightful stand as a world leader and teacher among the assembly of nations. To achieve this end, India must be economically and militarily powerful in the world today. Gandhi’s agenda of non-violence (ahimsa¯) is turned on its head. In Hindutva ˙ thinking, violence becomes a ready recourse rather than a desperate one for self- (and other-) preservation. It is with these nuances in mind that we must understand the following definition of what it is to be a Hindu according to VHP ideology, in terms of the three criteria mentioned earlier (noting that this definition is interpreted to serve different ends by the various affiliates of the Sangh Parivar): The term ‘Hindu’ according to the Parishad, is not to be interpreted in its narrow restricted sense, geographical or religious, but in the most comprehensive connotation to embrace all people who believe in, follow or at least respect the eternal values of life – ethical and spiritual – that have sprung up in Bharat, irrespective of the faiths which they follow [. . .] and irrespective of their Castes, Creeds, Colours or the places of their birth.52 We may conclude by reiterating that Hindu fundamentalism, whether of the scriptural or political variety, breaks the mould in several ways of the original Christian fundamentalism of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. In its scriptural form it is not as literalist as the latter, and on occasion it incorporates other texts than the Veda itself, though these additions are deemed to be eminently Vedic in character. Further, these scriptures are often regarded as providing the template for scientific as well as religious truth. In its political mode, Hindu fundamentalism is ethnically orientated, de facto tends towards xenophobia in one way or another, and has ethical-cultural rather than religiously narrow concerns; in this sense it may be described as ‘secular’, but it is ‘secular’ neither in

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the Nehruvian sense which demands a separation of religion from politics, nor in the Gandhian sense, for which all faiths must be viewed equally in the eyes of the Constitution. Like all fundamentalisms, both kinds of Hindu fundamentalism are ‘fundamentalist’ in so far as they lack ‘Integrative Complexity’, that is, in so far as their proponents seem incapable of integrating into their own positions, by way of empathetic (and not necessarily ‘sympathetic’) understanding, the complexities of life situations that seriously challenge their own views and invite them to arrive at more nuanced and accommodating conclusions.53 Fundamentalisms per se are inherently confrontational, exclusivist, and opposed to integrating the effects of changing circumstances into their systems. Consequently, the fundamentalist stance is ‘monochromatic’ and relatively lacking in cognitive and psychological depth. This uncompromising linearity of thinking is at odds with the flexibility of mind required to successfully negotiate, on both an intellectual and a practical level, the sinuous complexities of life that confront us today. As we know all too well, the consequences can be far-reaching, disruptive and even deadly.

Notes 1. ‘[T]he actual origin of the term “Fundamentalism” can be dated with some precision. [T]he origin lies in the publication of a series of 12 small matching books [. . .] entitled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth [. . .] published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles from 1910 to 1915 [. . .] the authors including well-known conservative Protestant scholars of the day’ (Dunn, Chapter 1). 2. ‘Text’ here need not refer only to the written word; it may refer also to oral narrative and material artefacts such as paintings and items of statuary. In this sense, one could speak of a fundamentalist reading of a statue or painting. 3. Reference to ‘a way of life’ in my definition excludes such trivial instances of source-texts as maps and instruction-manuals, though these may be included, I suppose, in contexts of parody, sarcasm, or humour. Note too that it is not necessary for the fundamentalist on this understanding to insist that others follow his or her way of life, or to take recourse to violence as a form of selfpreservation or enforcement. 4. W. Sweetman, Mapping Hinduism: ‘Hinduism’ and the Study of Indian Religions, 1660– 1776 (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle, 2003) and J. E. Llewellyn (ed.), Defining Hinduism: A Reader (Equinox, London, 2005), for example are two kinds of work that address this issue.

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5. Ironically, though the Roman Catholic Church was waging its own war against the modernist critique, the Los Angeles project queried: ‘Is Romanism Christianity?’, and described Rome as ‘The Antagonist of the Nation’ (see Dunn, Chapter 1). 6. ‘Modern’ can be understood in more than one sense: first, in the general sense of ‘contemporary’, ‘up-to-date’, and second, more particularly, in a periodising sense that distinguishes the time when reason, with special reference to western thought, no longer saw itself as subject or attentive to religious authority and objectives. The term is used here in the second sense; in this context we may speak of ‘modernism’ as an ideology that claims to champion the chief characteristics of ‘modernity’. 7. J. Prabhu, ‘Modernity’, M. Kirloskar-Steinbach et al., 2012, pp. 221, 225. 8. Ibid. 9. Thus, on the metamorphosis of the Taj Mahal from a twelfth-century Shiva temple to a Hindu palace to a Muslim tomb, see P. N. Oak, Taj Mahal – The True Story: The Tale of a Temple Vandalized (4th edn) (Houston: A. Ghosh, 1969), pp. 104, 161, and Chapter 22. 10. Dated by modern scholarship to some period in the second millennium BCE Scriptural Hindu fundamentalists assume a much earlier date. 11. R. F. Young, Resistant Hinduism: Sanskrit Sources on Anti-Christian Apologetics in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Vienna: University of Vienna Indological Institute, 1981), Chapter 4. 12. Traditionally, for the Hindu elite, who made the running in these matters, Sanskrit was the ‘accomplished’ (samskrta – from which the Anglicised form ˙ ˙ ‘Sanskrit’ derives) medium for articulating all that was religiously or culturally worth preserving. Even today, Sanskrit is deferred to as a cultural icon by perhaps the majority of Hindus (with the exception of the ‘dalits’ or ‘oppressed’ Hindus of the former so-called untouchable castes). 13. It is noteworthy that this consideration for reason led Muir later in life to adopt a less confrontational Christian stance. 14. Young, Resistant Hinduism, pp. 105, 108. ‘[T]hree of six chapters of the S´TV discussed the relation between faith (s´raddha¯) and reason (tarka or upapatti)’. 15. For the Sanskrit, see Young, Resistant Hinduism, pp. 107– 8, note 103. I have modified Young’s translation. 16. For the Sanskrit, see Young, Resistant Hinduism, pp. 107– 8, note 103. My translation. 17. Here Goreh takes a leaf out of the (non-dualist) Veda¯ntin, S´amkara’s (ca. eighth ˙ century CE ) book. In commenting on the epistemic scope of reason vis-a`-vis that of scripture, S´amkara says, ‘The cognitive authority ( pra¯ma¯nya) of scripture ˙ ˙ (s´ruti) applies not to the objects of perception and of the other [sources of knowledge], but to objects not known from such sources [. . .] For the cognitive authority of scripture concerns objects whose scope lies beyond [empirical experience] [. . .] Even if a hundred scriptural utterances were to say that fire is cold or that it is not bright, they would have no cognitive authority. If they were

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18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

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to say that fire is cold or that it is not bright, we would have to assume that they intended some other meaning, otherwise scripture would cease to be a source of knowledge. For scripture is neither opposed to other sources of knowledge nor inconsistent with itself’ (See his commentary on the Bhagavadgı¯ta¯ 18.66). In other words, the epistemic scope of scripture is separate from that of other sources of knowledge such as perception, inference, etc. This section on Muir, the MP and Goreh is taken, with some emendations, from J. Lipner, ‘A Modern Indian Christian Response’, H.G. Coward (ed.), Modern Indian Responses to Religious Pluralism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987). In due course ‘Swami’, viz. ‘Master/Teacher’, preceded his name. See J. T. F. Joordens, Dayananda Sarasvatı¯, His Life and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 103. This is also a diffusionist claim: ‘From [India] wisdom and science spread over the earth, first to East Asia, then to Greece and Rome, and thence to England’, Jordens, Dayananda Sarasvatı¯, p. 110. For the identification of the source-texts of Vedic knowledge according to Dayananda, see Jordens, Dayananda Sarasvatı¯, pp. 57 – 8, 272. Ibid., p. 103. Dayananda founded a politically-charged socio-religious reform movement called the Arya Samaj, which soon developed nationalist aspirations and acquired a considerable following especially in the northern half of the country. The Arya Samaj, through its political profile, lies at the historical roots of much current militant nationalist sentiment in India today. B. Bissoondoyal, Hindu Scriptures (Maritius: G. Gangaram, 1979), p. 16, note 20. The last two decennial censuses show a falling trajectory hovering around the 80 per cent mark for the percentage of Hindus in the Indian population. J. A. Lipner, ‘A Modern Indian Christian Response’, H. G. Coward (ed.), Modern Indian Responses to Religious Pluralism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987) 1996, 2004, 2006. Lipner, 2006, p. 100. The term ‘communalism’ in the Indian context emphasises sectarian affiliation in a conflictual situation. C. Bhatt, ‘Nationalism’, in K. A. Jacobsen (ed.), Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Vol. 5 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), pp. 750a – 1a. I have introduced, translated into English, and annotated the first two of these novels under the titles A¯nandamath or The Sacred Brotherhood (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Debı¯ Chaudhura¯n˙ı¯ or The Wife Who Came Home (Oxford University Press, 2009), respectively, and I ˙am now working on the third, Sı¯ta¯ra¯m. Unlike many Hindu culturalists and politicians who followed him, Bankim was nuanced in his selection of the adversarial Muslim; this was not the des´ı¯ Muslim or ‘son of the soil’ who had been converted to Islam (and resided mainly in the eastern sector of Bengal), but the jaban or ‘outsider’ Muslim whose forbears had ‘invaded’ India from such places as Afghanistan, Turkey, and Persia in centuries past and who had then settled in India to rule but with scant appreciation for

114

32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

FUNDAMENTALISMS Hindu culture. I have discussed this distinction with reference to Bankim in my AM 2005, pp. 63 – 70. This can be illustrated by a ‘test case’, viz. the choice of a National Song for independent India (in contrast to a national anthem). This became the first couple of verses of a hymn that appeared in Bankim’s A¯nandamath, entitled ˙ Vande Ma¯taram, ‘I revere the Mother’. That ‘Mother’ here refers to the ‘Motherland’ that was India is clear, but in the context of the hymn there can be little doubt that ‘Mother’ also refers to the (Hindu) Mother Goddess who is identified with the ‘Motherland’. It was the general Muslim consensus at the time that the larger context of the hymn was idolatrous and even anti-Muslim in sentiment, and that therefore this hymn was an unsuitable provenance for the National Song of a new state that sought to be religiously egalitarian. The relevant functionaries at the time, however – largely Hindu – went ahead with this choice for the National Song without subjecting their decision to the proprieties of an official debate (even Gandhi seemed blind to the controversial nature of the hymn), and Vande Ma¯taram remains a bone of contention with the Muslims of India to this day. I have discussed this matter both in the introduction to my edition of AM, and in Lipner 2008. V. D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (New Delhi: Hindi Sahitya Sadan, 2003), p. 4. ‘[W]hen we attempt to investigate into the essential significance of Hindutva we do not primarily [. . .] concern ourselves with any particular theocratic or religious dogma or creed’; a few sentences later he describes the term ‘Hinduism’ as ‘essentially sectarian’. Ibid., p. 29. The ancient Aryans had presumably entered the subcontinent from the northwest, for ‘The day on which the patriarchs of our race had crossed that stream [the Indus] they ceased to belong to the people they had definitely left behind and laid the foundation of a new nation – [they] were reborn into a new people that [. . .] were destined by assimilation and by expansion to grow into a race and a new polity that could only be most fittingly and feelingly described as Sindhu or Hindu.’ Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 84. ‘An American may become a citizen of India. He would certainly be entitled [. . .] to be treated as [. . .] a fellow citizen of ours. But as long as in addition to our country, he has not adopted our culture and our history, inherited our blood and has come to look upon our land not only as the land of his love but even of his worship, he cannot get himself incorporated into the Hindu fold [. . .] The Hindus [. . .] are not only a nation but also a race.’ Ibid., pp. 32, 82. ‘[I]t is indisputably true that [. . .] the epithet Sindhusthan calls up the image of our whole Motherland: the land that lies between Sindhu and Sindhu – from the Indus to the Seas.’ This expression is not easy to translate. Bha¯rat (Hindi) is the official name for the political entity that is India today; however, it derives from the ancient Sanskrit

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41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

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name (bha¯rata) for the land that was fit for the implementation of Vedic norms and practices. Thus modern Hindu political fundamentalists tend to use this name for India with a mystical twist, recalling this special earlier sense. So one contemporary Hindu politician of the right could say, when commenting on the notorious incident of December 2012 when a young woman was raped on a Delhi bus, that such an incident could happen only in ‘India’, never in ‘Bha¯rat’. It is in this idealistic sense that we must understand the meaning of ‘Akhil Bha¯rat’, viz. ‘Undivided Bha¯rat/India’ in a Hindu fundamentalist context. Ibid., pp. 115– 6. Ibid., pp. 42 – 4. The Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ‘was formed by [K.B.] Hedgewar [1889 – 1940] after he had read [Savarkar’s] Hindutva and had been further stimulated by a visit to Savarkar [. . .] [Hedgewar] was deeply influenced by the latter’s conception of the nation.’ C. Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1999). The RSS was founded in September 1925. ‘The RSS is the foundation for almost all the hindutva movements and networks that currently exist in India and the Indian diaspora’ Bhatt, ‘Nationalism’, p. 756b. Perhaps this claim is overstated; in any case, as we shall note, our aim here is not to assess rival claims to precedence, but to inquire into the common basis of Hindutva ideology, using the VHP as a point of entry. In the discussion that follows I have profited in particular from E. Hellman, ‘Political Hinduism: The Challenge of the Vis´va Hindu¯ Parisad’ (Paris: ˙ Doctoral Dissertation, Uppsala University, 1993). Hellman, ‘Political Hinduism’, p. 102. In so far as it is claimed that women and men tend by nature to be cut out to play specific roles in society (here the descriptive function of dharma comes to the fore). In its received form this large text (ca. 25,000 verses) is generally assigned, in its various strands, to the period ca. sixth century BCE to ca. fifth century CE . See J. Brockington, The Sanskrit Epics (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1998), pp. 377–97. Jaffrelot The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, pp. 196–204, 350–1, gives an account of the position of these holy men in early VHP strategy. I do not wish to make much of the view that Hindu political fundamentalism is in essence a ‘middle class’ or ‘urban’ phenomenon. In the Indian context such descriptors lack precision; in any case, through its strategy of large-scale mobilisation by way of participation in mass politicised ‘pilgrimages’ ( ja¯tra¯s) across regions, rallies, media events etc. these categories are transcended. An idea first developed in the modern period by Dayananda Sarasvati, and one way in which the influence of the original Brahmin inspiration of the Hindutva movement endures. On the concept of ‘Mother India’ as a forerunner of this notion of Bha¯rat Ma¯ta¯, see Lipner, 2005, pp. 98 – 102, 122– 4. Hellman, ‘Political Hinduism’, pp. 170–1.

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53. For more on the notion of ‘Integrative Complexity’ which defines a line of research, developed in the Divinity Faculty at Cambridge University, that seeks to study and prevent religious radicalisation, see S. Savage, ‘Head and Heart in preventing religious radicalization’, in F. Watts and G. Dumbreck (eds), Head and Heart: Perspectives from Religion and Psychology (West Conshohocken: Templeton Press, 2013).

Bibliography Bhatt, C., ‘Nationalism’, in K. A. Jacobsen (ed.), Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Vol. 5 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013). Bissoondoyal, B., Hindu Scriptures (Mauritius: G. Gangaram, 1979). Brockington, J., The Sanskrit Epics (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1998). Hellman, E., ‘Political Hinduism: The Challenge of the Vis´va Hindu¯ Parisad’ ˙ (Doctoral Dissertation: Uppsala University, 1993). Jaffrelot, C., The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1999). Lipner, J., ‘A Modern Indian Christian Response’, in H. G. Coward (ed.), Modern Indian Responses to Religious Pluralism (New York: University of New York Press, 1987). —— ‘Ancient Banyan: An Inquiry into the meaning of “Hinduness”’, Religious Studies (March 1996). —— ‘On Hinduism and Hinduisms: the way of the Banyan’, in S. Mittal and G. Thursby (eds), The Hindu World (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). —— ‘The rise of “Hinduism”: or, how to invent a world religion with only moderate success’, The International Journal of Hindu Studies 10/1 (April 2006). —— ‘“Icon and Mother”: An inquiry into India’s national song’, Journal of Hindu Studies (2008). —— Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). Llewellyn, J. E. (ed.), Defining Hinduism: A Reader (London: Equinox, 2005). Oak, P. N., Taj Mahal – The True Story: The Tale of a Temple Vandalized (Houston: A. Ghosh, 1969). Prabhu, J. B., ‘Modernity’, in M. Kirloskar-Steinbach, G. Dharampal-Frick and M. Friele (eds), Die Interkulturalitaets-debatte: Leit-und-Streitbegriffe (Muenchen: Verlag Karl Alber, 2012). Savage, S., ‘Head and Heart in preventing religious radicalization’, in F. Watts and G. Dumbreck (eds), Head and Heart: Perspectives from Religion and Psychology (West Conshohocken: Templeton Press, 2013). Savarkar, V. D., Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (New Delhi: Hindi Sahitya Sadan, 2003). Sweetman, W., Mapping Hinduism: ‘Hinduism’ and the Study of Indian Religions, 1660– 1776 (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle, 2003). Young, R. F., Resistant Hinduism: Sanskrit Sources on Anti-Christian Apologetics in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Vienna: Indological Institute, University of Vienna, 1981).

CHAPTER 7 FUNDAMENTALISM AND MODERNITY1 Peter R. Neumann

The idea of modernity and the revival of seemingly archaic religious ideas are not an obvious match. Yet many scholars have argued that fundamentalism and modernity are intrinsically linked.2 More so, some believe that modernity and late modern phenomena, especially globalisation, have, in fact, caused the ‘fundamentalist wave’.3 How can globalisation and modernity produce progress in one field and the apparent opposite in another? To make sense of this apparent contradiction, we need to take a closer look at the historical interplay between religion and modernity, perceptions and effects of globalisation and (late) modernity, and – finally – the ways in which fundamentalists have politicised in response to the (late) modern challenge. What doing so will show is that fundamentalism and modernity are not just linked, they are – in many respects – two sides of the same coin. Contemporary fundamentalism is far from being a ‘return to the middle ages’: it is a quintessentially modern phenomenon that requires a modern response.

Defining Modernity, ‘Late’ Modernity, and Globalisation Needless to say, none of the propositions put forward in this chapter are entirely straightforward, and it makes sense, therefore, to begin by explaining how key terms and concepts will be understood. Late

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modernity, which is often traced back to the end of World War II, describes the latest phase of modernity in which the social, political and economic processes that marked the modern era – the rise of capitalism and representative democracy, urbanisation, and industrialisation – have reached a new stage. Still rooted in modernity (hence, ‘late’ rather than ‘post’-modernity), prominent sociologists like Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman argue that late modernity represents a ‘radicalised’ version of modernity in which some of the trends and processes that were present in modernity continue but have been accelerated, prompting substantive changes in the ways we live and work and leading to a seemingly all-pervasive sense of uncertainty.4 Globalisation, which as an academic concept caught on in the 1990s, is widely seen as one of the defining characteristics of late modernity. Giddens, for example, looks at globalisation as an outgrowth of modernity rather than a separate development. Modernity and late modernity, he argues, are ‘inherently globalizing’,5 and indeed this chapter will demonstrate that, in many instances, it is difficult to understand one without the other(s). What, then, is globalisation? Sceptics argue that the international system is no more integrated now than it was in earlier historical periods, and that globalisation is neither novel nor valid nor relevant as a concept to describe change in the global political and economic system.6 There can be no question that these claims merit examination and debate, but the assumption underlying this chapter is that globalisation exists, that it represents a unique set of processes which have produced changes in degree and kind, and that its effects – through uneven – can be felt across the world. According to David Held and Anthony McGrew, globalisation describes (and can be measured in) kinds of processes: a ‘stretching’ of activities beyond national borders (extensity); the intensification of such activities (intensity); the ‘speeding up’ of global interactions (velocity); and, consequently, the growing significance of events and decisions in distant places (impact).7 Thus defined, globalisation can be said to have given rise not just to increased transnational flows of people, goods, capital and information but also to the creation of new ‘transcontinental or interregional [. . .] networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power’.8 It seems clear that important political events such as the end of the Cold War, as well as developments in communication, information technology and transportation, helped accelerate the deepening and

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widening of global integration, with many of its most profound consequences becoming obvious in the 1990s. The roots of the phenomenon, however, are more complex and date back further in time. Moreover, although, like modernity, globalisation may have been driven to a significant extent by developments in the economic sphere, it would be mistaken to view globalisation as purely economic in its causes and consequences. The drivers of globalisation can also be found in politics, culture and technology, and its impact has been felt in all these spheres of human activity, extending even to the cognitive – expressed, for example, in people’s changing sense of identity and their growing interest in, and realisation of, how events in faraway countries affect their lives.9

Religion and Modernity The notion that modernity and religion are opposed to each other is rooted in the Enlightenment, which began in the middle of the eighteenth century and whose central idea was for reason rather than tradition to be the guiding principle of all human endeavour. It inspired important philosophical paradigms such as rationalism which demanded that all human behaviour and decision-making should be informed by the same logical processes from which insights in the natural sciences were derived. Another key concept, empiricism, postulated that all human knowledge should be gained from actual experience and systematic observation rather than belief or faith.10 Not all Enlightenment thinkers agreed with each other (indeed, there are contradictions between rationalism and empiricism), but they all believed in progress – progress through reason – and that ‘The growth of knowledge [would enable] mankind to shape a future better than anything it has known in the past.’11 The combination of reason and the belief in progress – together with a near-violent rejection of anything that could be construed as superstition – made the Enlightenment a uniquely powerful philosophical movement whose assumptions paved the way for modernity and continue to underlie, if not dominate, the Western way of thinking. Arguably, the whole idea of the Enlightenment was constructed in opposition to the way in which religious ideas and institutions were believed to have stifled progress and held back humanity in the past.12

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One only needs to read the French author Voltaire (who subscribed to the idea of a supreme being but rejected the Catholic Church and much of its doctrine)13 to understand quite how strongly the protagonists of the movement believed that people’s potential would remain unfulfilled unless they freed themselves from the shackles of religious dogma. Conversely, they assumed that, if their ideas were allowed to spread, advances in technology, science and the resulting emancipation of society would make religion less plausible. The expectation was that knowledge and progress would lead to a decline in religious belief and practice: the more educated a society and the more it was governed by reason and rationality, the less it was necessary for people to look to religion and religious leaders for guidance. For the first few decades following the end of World War II, the Enlightenment hypothesis seemed to be borne out by declining church attendance figures in Western Europe and the increasingly secular lifestyles of educated elites in the developing world.14 By the mid1970s, however, sociologists and anthropologists were surprised to find that the seemingly unstoppable advance of secularism had come to a halt. Instead, conservative religious groups were springing up on all continents and in all cultures. The rise of the evangelical movement in the United States, Europe and parts of Latin America was echoed by the emergence of Hindu nationalism in India, the Islamic revival in the Middle East and the resurgence of Orthodox Judaism in Israel and among Diaspora Jews. Indeed, it did not take long until the various religious revivals came to be reflected in politics. Gilles Kepel singles out the second half of the 1970s as a turning point: in 1977, strong gains for the religious parties ended nearly 30 years of Labour Party rule in Israel; in 1978, the election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II signalled the return to a more traditionalist interpretation of Catholic doctrine; and in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini’s movement expelled the Shah from Tehran and established the Islamic Republic of Iran.15 Clearly, the Enlightenment hypothesis had failed to predict that people even in highly advanced societies could turn their back on progress and reason and revert to religious practices that many liberal minds considered anachronistic. How, then, could the sudden reversal be explained? In the early 1990s, many scholars began to argue that the two seemingly contradictory phenomena – late modernity and the religious revival – were in fact connected. Among the first to address the

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conundrum, Kepel argued that the return to religion was a reaction to the ‘worldwide discrediting of modernism’.16 He noted that, ‘wherever [religious revivalism] appears, it sets itself up against a “crisis” in society, claiming to have identified the underlying causes of that crisis beyond the economic, political or cultural symptoms through which it is manifested’.17 Writing at almost exactly the same time, Frank Lechner went even further, arguing that revivalist movements represented a form of resistance against not just modernity but, more specifically, the forces of globalisation. In his view, the emergence of such groups was ‘one effort among others to preserve or achieve a certain cultural authenticity in the face of a greedy, universalizing global culture’.18 Though somewhat more sophisticated than the Enlightenment hypothesis, these arguments ignored many of the subtleties that characterised the movements they sought to describe. Most significantly, they looked at religious revivals as if they represented a ‘return to tradition’, whereas – in many places – they clearly were entirely novel expressions of religiosity that had no precedent in a country’s religious history. Though using the language of religion, there was nothing ‘culturally authentic’ about, say, the Salafi movement, which had been virtually unknown in many parts of the Muslim world prior to the religious revival of the 1970s, nor did evangelical Christians have any tradition to go back to in historically Catholic countries like Brazil. It was misleading, therefore, to frame the religious revival in terms of a confrontation between tradition and modernity. Only in the mid-1990s did scholars manage to find a way of reconciling the religious revival with modernity. The American futurologist John Naisbitt conceived the notion of the ‘global paradox’, observing that, as globalisation unfolds, people have a tendency to revert to more ‘tribal’ concerns, such as ethnicity, language and religion.19 The political scientist Ben Barber popularised the terms ‘jihad’ and ‘McWorld’ as metaphors for the dialectic forces that marked the late modern experience. His explanation is worth quoting at length: What I have called forces of Jihad may [. . .] appear to be directly adversarial to the forces of McWorld. Yet Jihad stands not so much in stark opposition as in subtle counterpoint to McWorld and is itself a dialectical response to modernity whose features both reflect and reinforce the modern world’s virtues and vices – Jihad

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via McWorld rather Jihad versus McWorld [. . .] Modernity precedes and thus sponsors and conditions its critics. And though those critics, on the way to combating the modern, may try to resuscitate ancient usages and classical norms, such usages and norms – ethnicity, fundamentalist religion, nationalism, and culture for example – are themselves at least in part inventions of the agitated modern mind. Jihad is not only McWorld’s adversary, it is its child.20 Though Barber had mostly nationalism in mind and was referring to religious movements only in passing,21 his central idea – namely that ‘fundamentalist’ movements are products of modernity rather than the past – still provides the most compelling (and convincing) prism through which to interpret the religious revivals that began in the late 1970s. At the same time, his concept of ‘jihad vs. McWorld’ left the central question unanswered. What is it about late modernity that makes people want to embrace ‘fundamentalist’ religious movements? How exactly does exposure to late modernity lead to revivals in religiosity?

Late Modernity and Insecurity The key to unpacking the complex relationship between ‘jihad’ and ‘McWorld’ lies in understanding how late modernity not just made societies freer and more productive but how, in so doing, it has simultaneously produced more anxiety. When looking at Western countries, one can easily identify a whole range of uniquely late modern developments that have contributed to this widespread sense of insecurity. Take, for example, the use of technology and how it has challenged people’s sense of control over their own destiny. As the journalist George Will explains, late modernity has ‘multiplied [. . .] . dependencies on things utterly mysterious to those who are dependent – things such as semiconductors, which control the functioning of almost everything from cell phones to computers to cars.’22 Whenever such complex systems fail, people realise that their late modern existence relies on institutions and processes they do not know or understand and whose workings they cannot influence. In fact, many have come to understand that, with many such systems being

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interdependent, it takes the failure of just one system – say, electricity or computers – in order for its effects to ‘cascade down’ and affect other vital systems.23 Hence, while modern Western societies may have attained a degree of sophistication that is unparalleled in human history, it is precisely their sophistication that has made them seem vulnerable. Technical and scientific progress has not necessarily led to more control but, on the contrary, has produced an all-pervasive sense of fragility.24 A second factor to be considered is the massive economic and social changes that Western societies have undergone in the decades following World War II. As early as 1986, Ulrich Beck pointed out that, with the rise of structural unemployment, part-time work and the idea of job mobility, many of the certainties that had marked employment in the modern era had ceased to exist. These changes, he argued, had been accompanied by equally dramatic transformations in the social sphere, especially new generational values and gender equality.25 And indeed, people in Western societies nowadays get married later, have fewer children and are divorced more frequently.26 The traditional constants of marriage, family and lifetime employment, which brought stability to life in the modern era, no longer seem to be reliable guides for late modern biographies. There can be no doubt that late modernity has introduced more flexibility and choice – people are less constrained by family, neighbourhood, culture and social convention – but this has also created new demands. Life in the late modern era may be filled with opportunities, yet the overabundance of opportunity also seems to have created uncertainty and confusion. Globalisation has added a further dimension to the widespread sense of insecurity experienced in Western societies. Global migration has created hybrid identities, especially among the second and third generation descendants of immigrants, contributing to the attractiveness of transnational identities and ideologies.27 However, the impact of global migration has not been restricted to the immigrants themselves. Being confronted with the cultural, ethnic and religious ‘other’, whether in the form of immigrants or other foreign influences, has compelled indigenous populations to question their own sense of identity. John Tomlinson cites the example of Mexican labourers who, upon moving to the United States, ‘were pressed to [. . .] adopt a particular form of [. . .]

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identity as a member of a collective or “community”’,28 and – in turn – made US Americans think harder about their own identity. The same process, albeit on a larger scale, can be observed in Western Europe. The influx of foreign labour, which began in the late 1950s and 1960s, turned monocultural into multicultural societies and, in doing so, has raised often uncomfortable questions about what it means to be British, German or French. Globalisation and late modernity, then, have not just spread a generalised sense of uncertainty and instability but challenged the very idea of national identity.29 In developing countries, the tension between ‘jihad’ and ‘McWorld’ results not from the transition between modernity and late modernity but, rather, from the unsettling clashes that occur between the premodern, modern and late modern elements that co-exist in many of these societies. The geographical space in which such clashes are played out are the cities whose populations have multiplied in the course of the post-war demographic explosion and the resulting mass migration from the countryside, which Saskia Sassen pointedly described as ‘people on the run’.30 Such mega-cities contain the ‘new arrivals’ from the countryside, the recently settled lower and middle classes who occupy (often badly paid) jobs in trade, services and the industrial sector; and the (often Western) educated elites whose values, attitudes and lifestyles often resemble those of their late modern counterparts in the modern world. While each of these groups would have plenty of reason to feel anxious on their own, it is the interaction between them that has made their experience particularly intense. The lower and middle classes, for example, have long been frustrated about their lack of economic progress and access to higher social strata, especially in former colonies where the struggle for independence was accompanied by the hope for more justice and equity. What has caused them anxiety are the ‘recent arrivals’ who are competing against them for income, jobs and, more generally, a place in society. As a result, rather than moving up the social ladder, the lower and middle classes feel that they need to fight in order to keep what little they have got. For the ‘recent arrivals’, the challenge is both economic and social. Not only do they need to make ends meet, they also have to learn to cope in unsettling social environments with unfamiliar customs and practices. For instance, Mustpaha Pasha points out that, ‘removed from established patterns of

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rural life, the vast majority of Muslim youth who now inhabit the congested cities [in south Asia and the Arab world] confront unexpected encounter with the opposite sex’.31 Tossed into a ‘new social universe’ in which they lack orientation and cultural points of reference,32 many of the ‘recent arrivals’ are certain to go through periods of tension, uncertainty and confusion. As in the developed world, globalisation has added to the widespread sense of insecurity. Jamal Nassar shows that, while globalisation may have shrunk distances, it has simultaneously raised expectations, especially in the developing world where, thanks to the expansion of foreign tourism, returning labour migrants and satellite television, the dispossessed and the poor have been ‘educated’ about ‘their own poverty dispossession versus the rising wealth and power of the few’.33 It may well be true that economic globalisation has benefited millions, but these benefits have not ‘migrated’ as fast as people’s expectations,34 nor have they reached all the developing countries to the same extent. In 2005, a high-level working group of political economists, which convened at the International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security in Madrid, concluded that some countries’ successful integration into the world economy had been mirrored by the growth of ‘weak globalisers’ who become less competitive, whose populations have failing or stagnant incomes, and – as a result – experience growing unemployment, political tension, and religious fundamentalism. A number of African and Muslim countries have steadily ‘de-globalised’ over the last 25 years. The general effects are an increase in inequalities and social polarisation.35 Indeed, it is often overlooked that the same process of stratification has occurred within as well as between developing societies, and that, in many countries, the success of some has caused others to feel left behind. As the journalist Anand Giridharadas points out: Societies are not monolithic blocks that go global all at once. Social change has early and late adopters, and the choices of the timely alter the options among which the tardy must subsequently choose. And so a defining fact about globalization may be that it

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has freed untold millions from inherited destinies, even as it makes others feel as though their control over fate is slipping away.36 Those societies – or segments within societies – that have so far failed to take advantage of any economic benefits may experience globalisation as a threat. From their perspective, not only does globalisation seem to fail to deliver on the promise of prosperity, it is sometimes viewed as a pretext for the imposition of alien values and culture. Globalisation, therefore, has accentuated the conflict between the pre-modern, modern and late modern sections of developing societies and, thus contributed to the general sense of instability and turmoil that has marked many of these countries’ recent history. Despite a similar analysis of the problem, much of the literature in the 1990s focused almost exclusively on the resurgence of ethnonationalist identities. Barber himself concluded – somewhat confusingly – that ‘the language most commonly used to address the ends of the reinvented and self-described tribes waging Jihad [. . .] remains the language of nationalism’.37 This may have been the obvious conclusion to draw at the time, given the numerous instances of war, ethnic cleansing and even genocide that followed the breakups of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. In reality, though, nationalism was just one of several ways in which people could express their desire for certainty in an uncertain world. An equally powerful source was religion, yet Barber and many of his colleagues had lost the courage of their convictions: having correctly identified the dialectics of late modernity and the resurgence of identity that it had produced, they pushed religion to the margins, believing it was of secondary importance. In many ways, of course, religion was the more obvious source of identity in a rapidly changing global environment. Where people believed they had lost control over their destiny, religion offered a sense of direction and guidance. Where people were confused and overwhelmed by new choices and unfamiliar social environments, religion brought clarity and purpose. And where people felt threatened by instability, religion offered a way of making peace with themselves and the seemingly chaotic world around them. In short, religion provided meaning, direction and a sense of belonging in a world that appeared to have lost its way.

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The two fundamentalist revivals – religious and nationalist – not only shared the same roots, they also seem to have followed similar trajectories. Although their violent manifestations often became obvious only in the 1990s, they can both be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s.38 There was one important difference, however. Nationalism was political by definition, whereas religion and the religious revival were spiritual in the first and political only in the second instance. It may have been reasonable to assume, therefore, that the religious revival was less likely than the nationalist resurgence to ‘tip over’ into politics and political violence, especially terrorism. Yet it did, and in the final section, we will attempt explain how and why this happened.

Fundamentalism and Politics In the literature, we can find two approaches that seek to explain the politicisation of (fundamentalist) religion in the late modern period. The first revolves around the search for authenticity. It argues that all forms of secular governance in the post-war – especially post-colonial – era had failed, and that religion was the one culturally authentic system for organising a society that was left.39 During the Cold War, most of the so-called Third World countries had to align themselves with one of the two superpowers, yet neither communism nor capitalism provided the kinds of economic and social improvements that many people had hoped for, particularly in countries that had only achieved independence recently. On the contrary, secular nationalism – be it of the community or the capitalist variety – was experienced by many people as corrupt, oppressive and highlight inefficient. Paradoxically, then, the same secular ideologies that had mobilised the masses in the name of national liberation when under colonial rule came to be seen as forms of locally administered colonialism – a cunning way of exporting imperialist ideas ‘from the Western world, where [they] first emerged, to the rest of the world’.40 Against this background, religiously inspired government was perceived not only as a plausible alternative but, even more importantly, as the return to a culturally authentic way of life – even if the particular variety of religion that emerged as a result of the religious reveal was sometimes far from authentic.41 This process, of course, did not unfold everywhere. While almost every society that has been touched by modernity has experienced some

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form of religious revival, the politicisation of new religious movements happened in some parts of the world (the United States, parts of Africa, Israel, the Muslim world, India) but not in others (Europe, large parts of Latin American and Asia). It is beyond the scope of this essay to consider each of these places in detail, but the ‘failure of secularism’ hypothesis provides a plausible explanation for some of this regional variation. In the Muslim world and India, for example, religiously inspired political ideologies offered a clear alternative to what many people regarded as the secular, neo-colonialist status quo because the colonial experience had been recent and the language of the religious revival – Islam and Hindu nationalism respectively – provided a marker of cultural distinctiveness from the West. In Latin America, on the other hand, secularism was no longer bound up with colonialism in the public’s mind because most countries had been independent for more than a century. Furthermore, the religious revival in Latin America promoted an entirely novel, more distinctly Western version of Christianity (Protestantism) at the expense of the more traditional, historically rooted one (Catholicism). As a consequence, not only was there no demand for non-secular ideologies, it would have been hard to convey them as authentic. The second approach for explaining the politicisation of religion in the late modern period focuses on the widening gap between religious lifestyles and the social realities of late modernity. The movements that emerged as a result of the religious revival are often described as fundamentalist42 because they distinguish themselves from the rest of society in dress, customs and conduct; they are committed to conservative values, interpret holy texts literally, and – more often than not – hope to imitate an idealised past in which they believe perfect conditions for a sacred life existed. Modern and late modern societies, however, have made it increasingly difficult for such ‘fundamentalists’ to live their lives in accordance with those ideas. Most modern societies grant religious freedom and protect individuals’ right to exercise their faith. But they also conceive of religion as a private affair, with the result that – to varying degrees – religious expression has been excluded from the public arena. As John Garvey put it, modern societies have enforced a ‘clean separation: religion is a private affair; the public sphere is secular’.43 Consequently, fundamentalists have found themselves in social and political environments that they

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increasingly have regarded as alien to their way of life. Globalisation, which has imported foreign influences, only added to the perception that people’s religious identities are under threat and – more generally – that it has become impossible to reconcile religious principles with life in modern, secular societies. Faced with seemingly hostile societies, many fundamentalists felt they had to choose between ‘flight and fight’. One option was to withdraw and separate from mainstream society. In the United States, Christian evangelicals set up compounds in the sparsely populated Western states, established evangelical universities and colleges, and even took their children out of state schools so they could be taught at home. The purpose was to isolate and protect themselves from modern life, which was believed to contaminate the purity of the faith. In the words of Michael Apple, ‘This “cocooning” is not just about seeking an escape the problem of the city (a metaphor for danger and heterogeneity). It is a rejection of the entire idea of the city. Cultural and intellectual diversity, complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty and proximity to the Other – all these are to be shunned.’44 A similar – albeit far more extreme – response could be seen in a group of Egyptian Islamists in the 1970s who became known as Takfir wal-Hijra. Confronted with a society which they believed was morally corrupt, their leader, Shukri Mustafa, decided to excommunicate all Egyptian Muslims and then withdraw from ‘godless society’. Together with his followers, they set up camps in Upper Egypt where the group prepared for their triumphant return after (what they believed to be) the inevitable breakdown of the existing order.45 The other option – ‘fight’ – consisted of the exact opposite. Instead of withdrawing from society, some fundamentalists concluded that the public space had to be made safe for religion again. In their view, it was no longer sufficient for the state to protect people’s right to exercise their religious freedom in private when the whole of society had, in essence, become a vast conspiracy to prevent believers from being good Muslims/ Christians/Jews. All true believers had to be called upon to cross the ‘secular line’ and engage in politics so that the societal order would, once again, come to reflect the religious ideas and principles according to which life ought to be organised. Religion and religious identity thus turned into political activism and, for some, into a radical political project which – rather than merely safeguarding the right to believers to

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freely practise their religion and propagate their faith – advocated the transformation of all society according to religious principles. Ultimately, of course, this meant imposing religiously inspired tenets on those who were exercising their right to practise a different faith or no faith at all.

Conclusion It seems obvious, therefore, that contemporary political phenomena – including the rise of political Islam, or religiously inspired terrorism – did not occur in isolation from broader social and political trends, no matter how anachronistic they often seem. On the contrary, the (fundamentalist) religious revivals that occurred in the post-war period in nearly all parts of the world constituted a more or less consistent response to the feelings of insecurity and uncertainty that were caused by the forces which late modernity and globalisation had unleashed. Fundamentalist religion offered a sense of clarity, direction and purpose in a rapidly changing global environment and – like nationalism – it provided people with a stable and clearly defined source of identity. Fundamentalism, therefore, must be seen as thoroughly modern in its genesis and manifestation. It follows that the response to fundamentalism needs to address the modern and late modern conditions that have produced it. If the ultimate ‘root cause’ of fundamentalism is the need for identity and belonging in an increasingly uncertain age, governments and societies need to update concepts like integration and citizenship to accommodate the changing nature of global societies, while also – and importantly – creating strong anchors of identity that are more meaningful and distinctive than vague universalist norms like ‘human rights’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’. Unless identities such as ‘being British’, ‘being French’, or ‘being German’ have real meaning – unless, in other words, they go beyond universal norms on the one hand and national folklore and ethnic food on the other – people will fail to see the point in taking concepts such as citizenship and community seriously. Indeed, finding the right balance between universalism and identity will remain one of the most difficult and most frequently recurring challenges in the late modern era.

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Notes 1. This chapter is based on extracts from P. R. Neumann, Old and New Terrorism: Late Modernity, Globalization and the Transformation of Political Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), Chapter 4. 2. See, for example, S. Bruce, Fundamentalism (2nd edn) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). 3. See, for example, G. Kepel, The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), pp. 6 – 9. 4. Z. Baumann, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000); A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). See also U. Beck, A. Giddens and S. Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 5. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, p. 63. 6. See, for example, P. Hirst and G. Thompson, Globalization in Question (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), Chapter 2. 7. D. Held and A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt and J. Perraton, ‘Rethinking Globalization’, in D. Held and A. McGrew (eds), The Global Transformations Reader (2nd edn) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), pp. 67 – 8. 8. Ibid., p. 68. 9. D. Held and A. McGrew, ‘The great globalization debate: An introduction’, in D. Held (ed.), The Global Transformations Reader, p. 4. 10. M. C. Jacob, The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents (London: St Martin’s Press, 2000), Chapter 1. 11. J. Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (New York and London: The New Press, 2003), p. 7. 12. See P. Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Knopf, 1966), especially Book Two. More recently, scholars have argued that Christianity – far from being the enemy – has been instrumental in giving rise to the Enlightenment, albeit inadvertently. See, for example, S. J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: Myths of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 13. For a selection of writings by Voltaire and other key Enlightenment thinkers, see I. Kramnick, The Portable Enlightenment Reader (New York: Penguin, 1995), Part Three. 14. See, for example, C. G. Brown, ‘The secularisation decade: What the 1960s have done to the study of religious history’, in H. McLeod and W. Ustorf (eds), The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750– 2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 31. 15. Kepel, The Revenge of God, pp. 6 – 9. 16. Ibid., p. 3. 17. Ibid., p. 2. 18. F. J. Lechner, ‘Global fundamentalism’, in W. H. Swatos (ed.), A Future for Religion? (London: Sage, 1993), p. 28.

134 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

FUNDAMENTALISMS See J. Naisbitt, Global Paradox (New York: Avon, 1995). B. R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Ballantine, 1995), p. 157. See, for example, ibid., pp. 164– 5. G. Will, ‘Building a wall against talent’, Washington Post (26 June 2008). T. Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (New York: Island Press, 2008), p. 127. See U. Beck, Weltrisikogesellschaft (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), p. 26. U. Beck, Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), Chapter 2. The UK’s Office of National Statistics recently announced it had recorded the highest divorce rates since records began. In the United States, the number of couples who stay together for more than ten years after getting married dropped from over 90 per cent in the 1950s to less than 50 per cent in the 1990s. See R. Force, ‘Getting married? It could end in divorce?’, The Times (28 March 2008). See Neumann, Old and New Terrorism, Chapter 3. J. Tomlinson, ‘Globalization and cultural identity’ in D. Held and A. McGrew (eds), The Global Transformations Reader, pp. 271– 2. Ibid., p. 274. See S. Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 13, especially Chapter 1. Also S. Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). M. K. Pasha, ‘Globalization, Islam and resistance’, B. K. Gills (ed.), Globalization and the Politics of Resistance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), p. 250. Ibid. J. R. Nassar, Globalization and Terrorism: The Migration of Dreams and Nightmares (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), p. 104. Ibid., p. 14. T. R. Gurr, ‘Economic factors’ in Club de Madrid (ed.), Addressing the Causes of Terrorism (Madrid: Club de Madrid, 2005), p. 22. A. Giridharadas, ‘The paradox of “choice” in a globalized culture’, International Herald Tribune (12 September 2008). Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, pp. 164– 5. For various examples of the nationalist revival, especially in the Balkans and the Caucasus, see J. Koehler and C. Zu¨rcher (eds), Potentials of Disorder (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). This thesis has been argued by numerous scholars. See, for example, M. Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); M. Marty and S. Appleby (eds), Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies and Militance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003). A. al Masseri, quoted in A. Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 118. Also G. Salame, ‘Islam and the West’, Foreign Affairs (Spring 1993).

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41. See F. Burgat, Face to Face with Political Islam (London: I.B.Tauris, 2001), Chapter 1. 42. For discussion of the term ‘fundamentalism’, see F. Halliday, Two Hours that Shook the World: September 11, 2001 (London: Saqi Books, 2002), Chapter 2; B. Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003), pp. 15, 17 –18. 43. J. H. Garvey, ‘Fundamentalism and politics’, in Marty and Appleby (eds), Fundamentalisms and the State, p. 15. 44. M. W. Apple, ‘Away with all teachers: The cultural politics of homeschooling’, in B. S. Cooper (ed.), Home Schooling in Full View: A Reader (Greenwich, CO: Information Age Publishing), p. 80. 45. G. Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (London: I.B.Tauris, 2003), p. 221.

Bibliography Barber, B. R., Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Ballantine, 1995). Baumann, Z., Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). Beck, U., Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1986). —— Weltrisikogesellschaft (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2007). Bruce, S., Fundamentalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). Burgat, F., Face to Face with Political Islam (London: I.B.Tauris, 2001). Force, R., ‘Getting Married? It could end in divorce?’, The Times (28 March 2008). Gay, P., The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Knopf, 1966). Giddens, A., The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). Giridharadas, A., ‘The Paradox of “Choice” in a Globalized Culture’, International Herald Tribune (12 September 2008). Gray, J., Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (New York and London: The New Press, 2003). Gurr, T. R., ‘Economic Factors’, in Club de Madrid (ed.), Addressing the Causes of Terrorism (Madrid: Club de Madrid, 2005). Halliday, F., Two Hours that Shook the World: September 11, 2001 (London: Saqi Books, 2002). Held, D., A. McGrew, ‘The great globalization debate: An introduction’, in D. Held and A. McGrew (eds), The Global Transformations Reader (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003). Held, D., A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt and J. Perraton, ‘Rethinking globalization’, in D. Held and A. McGrew (eds), The Global Transformations Reader (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003). Hirst, P., and G. Thompson, Globalization in Question (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). Homer-Dixon, T., The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (New York: Island Press, 2008). Jacob, M. C., The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents (London: St Martin’s Press, 2000). Juergensmeyer, M., The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).

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Koehler, J., and C. Zu¨rcher (eds), Potentials of Disorder (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Kepel, G., The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). —— Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (London: I.B.Tauris, 2003). Kramnick, I., The Portable Enlightenment Reader (New York: Penguin, 1995). Lechner, F. J., ‘Global fundamentalism’, in W. H. Swatos (ed.), A Future for Religion? (London: Sage, 1993). Lewis, B., The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003). Marty, M., and S. Appleby (eds), Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies and Militance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003). Naisbitt, J., Global Paradox (New York: Avon, 1995). Nassar, J. R., Globalization and Terrorism: The Migration of Dreams and Nightmares (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). Neumann, P. R., Old and New Terrorism: Late Modernity, Globalization and the Transformation of Political Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009). Sassen, S., Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). —— Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: Free Press, 1998). Will, G., ‘Building a wall against talent’, Washington Post (26 June 2008).

CHAPTER 8 THE FEAR OF FUNDAMENTALISM Karen Armstrong

There is much debate about what fundamentalism is but I should like to begin by explaining what it is not.1 Fundamentalism is not necessarily violent; only a tiny proportion of fundamentalists take part in acts of terror and violence; most are simply trying to live what they regard as a truly religious life in a world that seems increasingly hostile to faith. Fundamentalisms are not harking back atavistically to the past: they reflect modern concerns and could have taken root in no time other than our own. Nor are these conservative movements: they are highly innovative and constitute a break with the past. When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared that a cleric should be head of state this was as shocking to Shiʿi sensibilities as if the pope should abolish the Mass and Protestant fundamentalists interpret their scriptures with a literalism that is unparalleled in the history of religion. Finally, fundamentalism is not a purely Islamic phenomenon. During the twentieth century, all the major world faiths experienced a fundamentalist revolution and Islam was the last of the three monotheistic traditions to develop a fundamentalist strain. So what is fundamentalism? It is basically a rebellion against modernity. In every region of the world where a secular government has separated religion and politics, a counter-cultural movement has emerged alongside it, determined to drag God and/or religion from the

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marginal position to which they have been relegated back to centrestage. Whatever the pundits or the politicians believe, people all over the globe have demonstrated that they want to see religion taking a more prominent role in public life. What is so problematic about modernity? Every fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is rooted in a profound fear; all are convinced that modern secular society wants to wipe out religion and each one begins with what is perceived to be an assault either by secularists or their liberal co-religionists. Fundamentalisms are haunted by a fear of annihilation. This should not be dismissed as paranoid. In Judaism, for example, fundamentalism took two major steps forward: first after the Nazi Holocaust, when Hitler had indeed attempted to exterminate European Jewry; and secondly after the October War of 1973, when the armies of Egypt and Syria took Israel by surprise and were repelled only with great difficulty. In the Muslim world, modernisation has often been problematic. Modernity and the values of which we are so proud – freedom, democracy, and toleration – were made not only possible but necessary because of a major change in the economy. Instead of being based on a surplus of agricultural produce, like all pre-modern civilisations, Europeans developed an economy based on the technological replication of resources and the constant reinvestment of capital, which liberated the modern West from many of the constraints of an agrarian economy that could never develop beyond a certain point. No society before our own could afford the constant replacement of the infrastructure that ceaseless progress demands. Ideas that required too great an expenditure of resources were generally shelved, and original thought was discouraged, not because of an innate timidity, but because these ideas could rarely be implemented and the consequent frustration could result in social instability. In the pre-modern world, the preservation of social order always took priority over intellectual freedom: civilisation was experienced as a fragile experiment and it was more important to preserve what had already been achieved than to risk losing it all by trying something new. Democracy did not become widespread because of an inherent Western magnanimity. To keep the markets expanding, more and more people had to be drawn into the productive process – as office clerks, printers, or factory workers. To perform their tasks efficiently they had to

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receive a modicum of education, and the more educated they became the more they began to demand a share in the decision-making of government. Modern communications also enabled the lower classes to organise politically in a way that had been impossible for the peasant masses in agrarian civilisations. It became clear, over time, that those countries that democratised outstripped those that tried to confine the benefits of modernity to a privileged elite. Toleration was also an industrial virtue; rulers had to utilise all their human resources and that meant bringing out-groups – such as the Jews in Europe and Catholics in England – into the mainstream; but the tragedy of the 1930s and 1940s showed how superficial this ‘toleration’ really was. The economy required independently-minded people, who could think unconventionally and were not impeded by the rules of their class, guild or clergy, so the conservative spirit had to be replaced by intellectual and religious freedom. In the West, therefore, modernisation had two major characteristics and, without these qualities, no matter how many computers, skyscrapers, and fighter jets a country produces, it will lack the modern spirit. The first was independence; modernisation was punctuated by declarations of independence on all fronts: Martin Luther declared independence from the Roman Church; the American Declaration of Independence was a typical modernising document; and scientists and intellectuals had to be free of the constraints imposed by the clerical or aristocratic establishment. The second modern attribute was innovation. Modernisation had been traumatic in Europe: it was achieved by bloody revolutions, civil wars, the elimination or impoverishment of the aristocracy, the execution of kings, wars of religion, dictatorships, the despoliation of the countryside, anomie and malaise in the new industrialised cities, and the exploitation of workers. We are seeing similar upheavals today as countries in the developing world make this painful rite of passage. But Western modernisation was exciting. We were always inventing something new, discovering something fresh, and pitting our wits against unprecedented problems. But in the Muslim world, the modern economy did not come with independence but with colonial subjugation; and it could not be innovative, because the West was so far ahead that Muslims could only copy us. Instead of independence, therefore, there was dependence, and instead of innovation there could only be imitation; instead of

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modernising according to an internal dynamic, colonised peoples have had to proceed according to a foreign programme. If you are trying to make a cake but have to rely on powdered instead of fresh eggs, rice instead of flour, and do not have a proper oven, you are not going to produce the fluffy confection described in the cook book; you could get something very nasty indeed. Further, in the Muslim world modernity has had to be effected far too rapidly. It took Europe centuries to commercialise society and these countries have had to go through the process in a few decades. As a result, modernisation has often been both superficial and extremely aggressive. When, for example, Atatu¨rk secularised Turkey he simply closed down all the madrasas, abolished the Sufi orders, which had played a huge role in the spiritual and social life of the country, and forced all Turks to wear Western clothes. This last has been a constant preoccupation for reforming modernisers, although there is nothing sacred – or, indeed, particularly becoming – about Western dress, they wanted their countries to look modern, even though only a very small percentage of the population had any understanding of Western culture. The violent methods used to achieve this have had a backlash, making the veil a symbol of Islamic authenticity for the first time in Muslim history.2 In Iran, Shah Reza Pahlavi (r. 1921– 45) ordered his soldiers to patrol the streets tearing the women’s veils off with their bayonets and ripping them to pieces. In 1935, his troops fired into an unarmed crowd in Mashhad, one of the holiest shrines in Iran, who were peacefully protesting against obligatory Western dress. Hundreds of Iranians died that day. In such an environment modernity did not seem liberating but was experienced as a lethal assault. The fundamentalism of Sunni Islam developed in the concentration camps in which President Gamal Abdul Nasser (r. 1952– 70) incarcerated thousands of the Muslim Brothers, usually without trial and for doing nothing more incriminating than handing out leaflets or attending a meeting. One of them was Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), who had once seen no conflict between his religion and secular nationalism. But when he watched the Brothers being tortured, flogged and executed and Nasser vowing to secularise Egypt on the Western model, secular modernity seemed a great evil. Qutb’s writings are haunted by a fear of imminent annihilation. They have made an indelible impression on the Muslim world, because many are now convinced that the modern world has decided to destroy Islam.

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Modernity has brought great benefits to many of us, but there have always been casualties: Jews, Native Americans, and African-Americans as well as the colonised peoples have suffered irreparable loss. During a visit to Senegal with the United Nations in 2006, I visited the slave house, which housed the Africans who had been torn brutally from their homes and were waiting to be shipped to the Americas. It was a terrible place: there was one room for the men; another for their wives; and the children were incarcerated in a room on the other side of a small hall. Parents would have been able to hear their children crying. What impressed me most, however, was the fact that the house was built in the same year as the American Declaration of Independence. Modernity has brought liberty and power to some; misery, death, and enslavement to others. It is essential that we bear this pain in mind. It is a great mistake to regard fundamentalism with secularist hauteur. Early in my studies, I came across a footnote in Marshall G. S. Hodgsons’s magisterial survey of Islamic civilisation; it made a great impression upon me and entirely changed my attitude towards religion. In the course of his discussion of an abstruse form of medieval Islamic mysticism, Hodgson warns his reader not to approach the spiritualities of the past from the vantage point of post Enlightenment rationalism but to cultivate what the great French Islamist Louis Massignon called the ‘science of compassion’. By ‘science’, of course, Massignon did not mean physics or chemistry but a form of ‘knowledge’ (Latin: scientia) achieved by ‘compassion’, an ability to ‘feel with’ the other (Latin: compati-). It meant putting yourself, your preferences and presuppositions to one side and entering in a scholarly but imaginative way into the predicament of another: The scholarly observer must render the mental and practical behaviour of a group into terms available in his own mental resources, which should remain personally felt even while informed with a breadth of reference which will allow other educated persons to make sense of them. But this must not be to substitute his own and his readers’ conventions for the original, but to broaden his own perspective so that it can make a place for the other. Concretely, he must never be satisfied to cease asking ‘but why?’ until he has driven his understanding to the point where he has an immediate grasp of what a given position meant,

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such that every nuance in the data is accounted for and withal, given the total of presuppositions and circumstances, he could feel himself doing the same.3 But this does not simply apply to religious practices in the past; the ‘science of compassion’ is essential to our study of fundamentalism. Dialogue is one of the buzz words of our time; but the dialogue form invented by Socrates, founder of the Western rational tradition, demanded that people interrogate their most fundamental prejudices. To philosophise was not to bludgeon your opponent into accepting your point of view but to do battle with yourself, questioning every one of your received opinions and most deeply held certainties. A successful dialogue should lead to ekstasis, a ‘stepping outside’ one’s preconceptions, inhabiting another person’s point of view, and being changed by the encounter. In our study of fundamentalism instead of simply pontificating on its limitations we have to learn to listen to the pain that often lies beneath the surface of fundamentalist discourse. Instead of simply dismissing the apocalyptic vision of American Protestant fundamentalists, as lunatic and deranged, we should, perhaps, see it as expressive of trauma. A patient who approached a psychiatrist with such a nightmarish fantasy of catastrophe, massacre, destruction, deceit, battle, plague, and ubiquitous, irredeemable wickedness would probably be diagnosed as somewhat disturbed. The fact that millions of people in the richest and most powerful nation in the world believe implicitly in this (eccentric) interpretation of the book of Revelation is extremely worrying. So too is the belief of so many Muslim fundamentalists in a giant international conspiracy intent on the destruction of Islam; this kind of conspiracy thinking has recurred throughout history. It led to the pogroms that terrorised the Jews of Europe. It surfaces in people feeling themselves to be in the grip of changes that they do not understand, living in regimes that lack transparency so that accurate information is hard to come by, and feeling that they have no control at all over their destiny. Fundamentalists are expressing fears and anxieties that no society can safely ignore. History shows that when fundamentalists are attacked – either with guns or in a media campaign – they invariably become more extreme. The assault convinces them that their intuitions are correct and the modern world really is out to destroy them. This was what happened

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after the famous Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee (1925), when Protestant fundamentalists tried to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools. The press gleefully and cruelly exposed the fundamentalist position as hopeless anachronisms. The journalist H. L. Mencken denounced them as the scourge of the nation, the enemies of science and intellectual liberty, who had no place in the modern world and would drag America back to the dark ages. They were, of course, absolutely right to insist that science must have the freedom it needed to advance, but instead of ameliorating a serious conflict within American society, this media assault made it worse. Fundamentalist abhorrence of evolution was fuelled less by science than by the vulgar social Darwinism that blamed evolutionary theory, with its emphasis on the survival of the fittest, for the German atrocities of World War I. Evolution was not simply a scientific hypothesis for the fundamentalists, but had become a symbol of everything that was most violent and terrifying in the modern world at a time when people were trying to come to terms with the bloodiest war in history. Their faith was rooted in an anxiety that could not be assuaged by a purely rational argument.4 Before the trial, only a small minority had argued that Genesis was scientifically sound in every detail; after the trial, they became more militantly literal in their interpretation of the Bible and ‘creation science’ became the flagship of their movement. They also drifted to the right of the political spectrum. Before Dayton, leading fundamentalists had been willing to work for social reform with people on the left; afterwards they swung to the far right, where they have remained. In June 1990, during an acute economic crisis in Algeria, the moderate Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) scored major victories in the municipal elections. FIS activists were young, well-educated, conservative in some areas (such as their insistence on traditional dress for women), but known to be honest and efficient in government. They were not anti-Western; their leaders spoke of encouraging links with the European Union. They seemed certain to succeed in the legislative elections scheduled for 1992. But the military staged a coup, suppressed FIS and threw its leaders into prison. Had elections been prevented in such a violent and unconstitutional manner in Iran or Pakistan, there would have been an outcry in the West; but because it was an Islamic government that had been thwarted, there was jubilation in the Western media. The bars and casinos of Algiers were safe and, in some strange

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way, the coup had struck a blow for democracy. The French government threw its support behind the new hard-line President Liamine Zeroual and strengthened his resolve to hold no further dialogue with FIS. The result was tragic and predictable. Pushed outside the due processes of law, despairing of justice, the more radical members of FIS broke away to form a guerrilla organisation, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and began a terror campaign in the mountainous regions south of Algiers. There were massacres, in which the population of entire villages were killed. The violence of the coup to stop the elections had led to an outright war between the religious and secularists and made a moderate group dangerously extreme.5 As I write this in the late summer of 2013, the recent military coup in Egypt that deposed the government of President Muhammad Morsy of the Muslim Brotherhood and was succeeded by riots in which hundreds of people have died, seems painfully close to the Algerian tragedy. It is difficult for liberal secularists to enter the perspective of the fundamentalist or the ultra-Orthodox because they can feel that their own identity is in jeopardy. This has been eloquently expressed by the celebrated Israeli novelist Amos Oz. Walking around an Orthodox district in Jerusalem, he recalled that the early Zionists, who once lived there, ‘would have banished this reality from the world around them and from within their souls [. . .] They portrayed this world as a swamp, a heap of dead words and extinguished souls.’ But now Oz felt overwhelmed by the vitality of this Orthodoxy, ‘for as it grows and swells, it threatens your own spiritual existence and eats away at the roots of your own world, prepared to inherit it all when you and your kind are gone’.6 Secularists can also fear annihilation and feel irrational dread when they confront the fundamentalist. Neither can see the other clearly. Both recall the excesses, cruelties, and intolerance of the ‘other side’ and, wounded, find it impossible to make peace. I had a similar experience at a conference called ‘God in the Year 2000’. I was one of seven speakers, who represented a wide spectrum of different faiths, asked to explain what I personally had learned about God in my studies. It was a wonderful, lively conference with a responsive, eager audience. In the last session, all seven of us were on stage together for a final panel. Suddenly a fundamentalist erupted in the hall. It was difficult to make out what he was saying, because his words tumbled over one another so incoherently, but the gist of it was that Jews

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and Muslims had rejected Jesus and would go to Hell and people, like myself, who supported them would join them there. What was clear, however, was the extraordinary note of pain in his voice as he denounced us. During the conference we had been speaking with immense enthusiasm of pluralism, interfaith understanding, and the underlying harmony of all world faiths – all of which were sacred values for us and had immeasurably enriched our lives. But we had somehow assaulted that man at a profound level. When he was hustled out of the hall, the moderator said: ‘I wish we could have talked to him, because he is part of the story of God at 2000.’ He was quite right. Yet as we listened to the fundamentalist’s diatribe, all seven of us, who had talked unstoppably and fluently for three days, were struck dumb and had been utterly unable even to speak to him. We had gazed at him in silence over an unbridgeable gulf of incomprehension and distance. That same abyss is getting wider every day in the Middle East, in Israel and the United States – and this too is a danger that no society can safely ignore.

Notes 1. I have written at length about fundamentalism in The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (London and New York: HarperCollins, 2000). 2. L. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 127– 234. 3. M. G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam; Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 379; see L. Massignon, ‘Les Nusayrıˆs’, in L’Elaboration de l’Islam (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), pp. 109– 14. 4. R. L. Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 161– 3. 5. There has been some suggestion that the Algerian armed forces participated in the massacres to discredit the GIA. 6. A. Oz, In the Land of Israel, trans. Maurice Goldberg-Bartura (London: Flamingo, 1983), pp. 6, 9.

Bibliography Ahmed, L., Women and Gender in Islam, Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1992). Armstrong, K., The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (London and New York: HarperCollins, 2000).

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Hodgson, M. G. S., The Venture of Islam; Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). Laurence Moore, R., Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Oz, A., In the Land of Israel, trans. Maurice Goldberg-Bartura (London: Mariner Books, 1983).

CHAPTER 9 SCIENTIFIC FUNDAMENTALISM John Lennox

The term ‘fundamentalism’ has a decidedly negative ring. It is an attitude of which one is said to be ‘guilty’ and it triggers in most people’s minds thoughts of extreme views, especially in the religious sphere. These views may range very widely. For instance, militant Islamic terrorists are called fundamentalists as are the peace-loving Amish. Indeed, because of the wide spectrum it covers some regard the word ‘fundamentalism’ as unhelpfully imprecise and misleading. However, we are stuck with its constant use and my purpose in this essay is to examine whether the ideas connected with fundamentalism extend beyond religion to science. Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci certainly thinks that fundamentalism has a wider remit than religion. He defines it as a ‘form of ideological intransigence which is not limited to religion [. . .]’.1 And in his book Darwin’s Angel, John Cornwell suggests that scientists, also, may be guilty of fundamentalism: ‘Fundamentalists are determined aggressive dogmatists, insisting that they, and they alone, are right.’ Cornwell then addresses Richard Dawkins with the rhetorical question: ‘Do you think it is just as possible to be a scientific fundamentalist as [to be] a religious one?’2 Cornwell evidently expects a positive answer. The celebrated physicist Peter Higgs (Nobel Prize 2013) agrees. In an interview in December 2011 he said: ‘What Dawkins does too often is to concentrate his attack on fundamentalists. But there are many believers who are just not fundamentalists [. . .]’ Higgs went on to say that

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Dawkins in a way is ‘almost a fundamentalist himself of another kind’ whose approach he found embarrassing.3 Striking examples of ‘determined aggressive dogmatism’ in science are not hard to come by. For instance, at a conference at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, California in 2006 on the theme: ‘Beyond belief: science, religion, reason and survival’, physics Nobel prizewinner Steven Weinberg addressed the question whether science should do away with religion. Weinberg said: ‘The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religion [. . .] Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization.’4 This attitude is scarcely new as Weinberg here vividly echoes the nineteenth century attempt by T. H. Huxley to loosen the grip of Christianity and achieve the secularisation of society through the domination of science. This theme was very evident in 1874 at a famous meeting of the British Association in Belfast at which Huxley, Hooker (botanist) and John Tyndall (President of the British Association for Science and Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution) were main speakers. In his presidential address Tyndall said: ‘All religious theories must submit to the control of science and relinquish all thought of controlling it.’5 Weinberg’s contemporary appeal goes even further: ‘anything we can do to weaken the hold of religion’ arguably demonstrates another common aspect of fundamentalism – totalitarianism. And all in the name of science. Even more sinister is the following fundamentalist sounding statement by neuroscientist Sam Harris: ‘Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.’6 We might well ask if it will be such scientific fundamentalists who in the end have the authority to decide what those deadly propositions are and who will execute the sentence? It is, of course, important to emphasise that scientific fundamentalism is by definition an extreme position and is far from representative of the main body of scientists who recognise that nature is open to many different interpretations and that one can be a serious scientist whether or not one believes in God. Peter Higgs again:

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The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that’s not the same thing as saying they’re incompatible. It’s just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined. But that doesn’t end the whole thing. Anybody who is a convinced but not a dogmatic believer can continue to hold his belief. It means I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past.7 Higgs pointed out that a lot of scientists in his field were religious believers. ‘I don’t happen to be one myself, but maybe that’s just more a matter of my family background than that there’s any fundamental difficulty about reconciling the two.’8 The late Harvard palaeontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, took a similar stance: ‘Either half of my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs – and equally compatible with atheism [. . .] science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible existence.’9 Gould regarded science and religion as non-overlapping ‘magisteria’ each dealing with a different set of questions. The attitude of Higgs and Gould is evidently very different from that of Weinberg and Harris. Indeed, at the La Jolla forum addressed by Weinberg, the tone of intolerance reached such a peak that anthropologist Melvin J. Konner commented: ‘The viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?’10 Militant scientific fundamentalism? The tragedy is that, although these extreme views are those of a minority, they are widely influential and bring science itself into dispute.

Scientism Fundamentalist aggression of any kind goes hand in hand with exaggerated truth claims. We already have a name for this definitive aspect of scientific fundamentalism – scientism, the epistemological belief that science alone can deliver truth, that all valid knowledge is science so that, in the end, science is to be equated with rationality.

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In the Encyclopedia of Religion and Science, philosopher Mikael Stenmark writes, while the doctrines that are described as scientism have many possible forms and varying degrees of ambition, they share the idea that the boundaries of science (that is, typically the natural sciences) could and should be expanded so that something that has not been previously considered as a subject pertinent to science can now be understood as part of science (usually with science becoming the sole or the main arbiter regarding this area or dimension).11 According to Stenmark, the strongest form of scientism states that science has no boundaries and that all human problems and all aspects of human endeavour, with due time, will be dealt with and solved by science alone. Stenmark calls this scientific expansionism. It is a form of intellectual imperialism. Bertrand Russell gave what is a very effective definition of scientism though he did not himself fully subscribe to the view: ‘Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.’12 This statement, however, is self-contradictory. It is not a statement of science and so according to its own logic it must be unknowable. Undeterred by such elementary logic, physical chemist Peter Atkins, defends scientism with characteristic fundamentalist vigour: There is no reason to suppose that science cannot deal with every aspect of existence. Only the religious – among whom I include not only the prejudiced but the under-informed – hope there is a dark corner of the physical universe, or of the universe of experience, that science can never hope to illuminate. But science has never encountered a barrier and the only grounds for supposing that reductionism will fail are pessimism on the part of scientists and fear in the minds of the religious.13 One cannot help notice another characteristic of fundamentalism here – only the ignorant will reject our view. Physicist Stephen Hawking opens his book The Grand Design (coauthored with Leonard Mlodinow) with a list of ‘big questions’ like ‘What is the nature of reality?’ He then says:

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Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. It has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly in physics. As a result scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.14 Scientism with a vengeance once more. The irony is that, having declared philosophy to be dead, Hawking and Mlodinow nevertheless proceed, clearly unawares, to write a book on (the) philosophy (of science). Astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss also appears to have little time for philosophy: ‘Every time there’s a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers.’15 However, as philosopher Massimo Pugliucci points out: ‘This clearly shows two things: first, that Krauss does not understand what the business of philosophy is [. . .] second, that Krauss doesn’t mind playing armchair psychologist, despite the dearth of evidence for his pop psychological “explanation”.’16 Indeed, under pressure, Krauss has had to soften his attack on philosophy. The claim that science is the only way to truth is a claim unworthy of science itself. Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar points this out in his excellent book Advice to a Young Scientist: There is no quicker way for a scientist to bring discredit upon himself and upon his profession than roundly to declare [. . .] that science knows, or soon will know, the answers to all questions worth asking, and that questions which do not admit a scientific answer are in some way non-questions.17 Science has been phenomenally successful but it would be a pity if hubris and a fundamentalist attitude to it were to rob young people of the importance of the arts in all their richness to deal with questions of meaning. Religious fundamentalism (especially in the United States) is often held to be the sole culprit responsible for a widespread suspicion of science. Following Medawar, I would suggest, in addition, that the confusion of scientism with science is plausibly one of the main reasons why science is regarded with suspicion and even rejected, by sections of the general public.

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Medawar presses on with his case: The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things – questions such as: ‘How did everything begin?’; ‘What are we all here for?’; ‘What is the point of living?’18 He adds: ‘Doctrinaire positivism – now something of a period piece – dismissed all such non-questions or pseudo-questions that only simpletons ask and only the gullible profess to be able to answer’.19 Medawar does not of course mean that science does the main work and there is a little bit left over for the other disciplines. Indeed, questions of meaning and value are arguably much more important than questions of function. Teleological thinking is not to be dismissed in a cavalier way. I wonder how Medawar would have responded to Dawkins’ doctrinaire positivist statement that since we now have modern biology ‘we no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems; is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?’20 As if the only alternative to biology is superstition. Ian Hutchinson, an MIT physicist, warns in this connection of the ‘knowledge domination of scientism’ – the view that science is the only game in town.21 After all, it is surely obvious that if scientism were true, half the departments in each university would have to close and the British Academy would cease to exist. It might be worth replacing the term ‘scientism’ by ‘scientific fundamentalism’ in order to alert a wider public to its existence and dangers. Cosmologist George Ellis says that the essential nature of scientific fundamentalism (and of all other fundamentalisms) is that a partial truth is proclaimed as the whole truth. Only one viewpoint is allowed on any issue, all others are false. This dogmatism is combined with an inability to relate understanding to context. Admitting that what is important varies with the context would undermine the fundamentalist’s need to see the same single issue as dominant in every situation, come what may.22 Ellis regards such fundamentalism as ‘a major problem’.

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He is right about this ‘one size fits all’ attitude – especially when it comes to the way in which scientific fundamentalism handles the nature of explanation.

Scientific Fundamentalism and the Nature of Explanation Philosophers of science are well aware of the difficulty inherent in defining science – and scientism compounds that difficulty in some very unhelpful ways. Take for instance the matter of explanation. We are all familiar with the claim that science explains, and indeed with the fundamentalist claim that science explains everything. That raises the question as to what constitutes a scientific explanation. This is not the easy question it was once thought to be – witness the prolific literature on the nature of science. One response is to say that science explains in terms of laws and mechanisms – witness the brilliant success of Newton. So, for instance, Newton’s law of gravity ‘explains’. But what does it explain? It certainly explains how to do mathematical calculations to determine the orbits of the planets that move under gravity. But it does not explain what gravity is – as Newton himself realised. In fact no-one knows what gravity is – nor, for good measure, do they know what energy is. We can do impressive and useful calculations using the laws that govern gravity and energy but we cannot give a definitive explanation of what they are. However, such is the hubris of scientism that many people are deceived into thinking that once scientists have found a law they have found a complete explanation. This is not so as the distinguished German philosopher Robert Spaemann points out: Science does not try to find out, as Aristotle did, why the stone falls downwards. It rather tries to discover the laws according to which it falls. And that constitutes scientific ‘explanation’. But Wittgenstein writes: The great delusion of modernity is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing.23 Furthermore, scientific fundamentalism obscures the fact that there may be several levels of explanation of the same phenomenon, not all of

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which are necessarily scientific. For instance, a Ford car engine can be ‘explained’ in terms of automobile engineering and the law of internal combustion – a scientific explanation; it can also be ‘explained’ in terms of Henry Ford – explanation in terms of an intelligent agent. These explanations are both rational that neither compete nor conflict but complement one another. It should also be observed that neither explanation is complete on its own – both are necessary. Our illustration also shows that different kinds of questions are involved in the two levels of explanation. The scientific side involves ‘how’ questions related to the car engine, and ‘why’ questions of function – ‘why is that gearwheel in that place’ etc. The agentexplanation answers ‘why’ questions of purpose and intentionality that ‘how’ questions do not address. Scientific fundamentalism, true to its name, often counters by outright denial of the validity of the ‘why’ question in the second level of explanation especially (but not only) when we scale the illustration up from a car engine to the universe. Such denial has no apparent justification and is certainly not a valid scientific response. This provides us with another example to substantiate Ellis’ point above that all fundamentalisms involve a partial truth being proclaimed as the whole truth. The rejection of multi-level explanation leads scientism into a headon clash with theology, a clash that, sadly, has had the inevitable effect of perpetuating the conflict myth that science and religion are mutually exclusive. Historians and philosophers of science have long since dismissed as evidence for that conflict the iconic disputes of Galileo and the Roman Catholic Church and of Huxley and Wilberforce. For instance, historian of science Colin Russell concludes: The common belief that [. . .] the actual relations between religion and science over the last few centuries have been marked by deep and enduring hostility [. . .] is not only historically inaccurate, but actually a caricature so grotesque that what needs to be explained is how it could possibly have achieved any degree of respectability.24 Indeed, it ought to be evident that the conflict is not between science and religion. William Phillips and Peter Higgs have both won the Nobel Prize for physics. Phillips is a Christian and Higgs an atheist.

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What divides them is obviously not their science. It is their worldview. And at the level of worldview there is, of course, a real conflict. Naturalism and theism are diametrically opposed and irreconcilable. Once we understand that this is where the conflict lies, we are in a better position to understand the nature of scientific fundamentalism.

Scientific Fundamentalism and Worldview Science is (at least) a set of intellectual disciplines that have as a prime objective the study of the natural world. Scientific fundamentalism, or scientism is a worldview that claims that science is able to answer all the big questions. As a worldview it is closely related to and by some even regarded as synonymous with naturalism or even materialism. Scientism is essentially atheistic since it rejects a priori the concept of God the supernatural creator and upholder of the cosmos, who is the answer to the question as to why there is a universe at all in which science can be done, and who is the explanation as to why scientific explanations are possible. Scientism appears totally incapable of seeing that God does not compete with science as an explanation. It insists that he does and therefore God must go. The reason for this is not far to seek. Since scientism’s tunnel vision cannot conceive that any (intelligent) person could believe in a supernatural Creator God – even though many do – it erroneously concludes that the only kind of God people could possibly believe in is the so-called God of the Gaps of the ‘I can’t understand it, therefore God did it’ variety. Now, such a god is by definition simply a mythical and temporary place-holder for present human ignorance, an unknown X that disappears when a scientific explanation is forthcoming, just as the ancient gods of thunder and lightning are dispatched by elementary considerations from atmospheric physics. However, it would be hard to find a serious-minded Jew, Christian or Moslem who believed in such a god. They all believe in a God who is God of the whole show – the bits we do not understand and the bits we do. It is the widespread misconception of God as a God of the gaps that helps us understand why scientific fundamentalism insists that we must choose between science and God. For it is obvious that if you regard God as a God of the gaps then of course you must choose between science and God since that is the way you have defined God.

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Scientific fundamentalism is therefore potentially educationally damaging since in erroneously pitting science against God it could be seriously off-putting to believers in God who wished to study science – of which there are many. Before we leave the concept of a ‘god of the gaps’ it is worth pointing out that there is a parallel phenomenon, ‘evolution of the gaps’, in scientism’s one-track insistence on invoking evolution at every possible juncture. Nobel Laureate physicist Robert Laughlin, whose research is on the properties of matter that make life possible, warns scientists about the dangers of this kind of thinking: Much of present day biological knowledge is ideological. A key symptom of ideological thinking is the explanation that it has no implications and cannot be tested. I call such logical dead ends anti-theories because they have exactly the opposite effect of real theories: they stop thinking rather than stimulate it. Evolution by natural selection, for instance, which Darwin conceived as a great theory has lately come to function as an anti-theory called upon to cover up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst even wrong. Your protein defies the laws of mass action – evolution did it! Your complicated mess of chemical reactions turns into a chicken – evolution! The human brain works on logical principles no computer can emulate? Evolution is the cause!25 I am tempted to think that belief in an ‘evolution of the gaps’ is probably more widespread than belief in a ‘God of the gaps’, since concentration on the latter allows the former to thrive undetected. A survey of the literature tempts me to ask whether the close link between scientism and atheism could have to do with a conflation of science and scientism that is sometimes subsumed in definitions of science itself. For instance, Massimo Pigliucci holds that: ‘The basic assumption of science is that the world can be explained entirely in physical terms, without recourse to godlike entities.’26 The word ‘entirely’ is again an indicator of scientific fundamentalism and this, coupled with the last phrase banishes God from the world at all levels of explanation. So for Pigliucci science itself is inextricably coupled to atheism.

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Similarly, Nobel Laureate Christian de Duve says: Scientific enquiry rests on the notion that all manifestations in the universe are explainable in natural terms, without supernatural intervention. Strictly speaking, this notion is not an a priori philosophical stand or profession of belief. It is a postulate, a working hypothesis that we should be prepared to abandon if faced with facts that defy every attempt at rational explanation. Many scientists, however, do not bother to make this distinction, tacitly extrapolating from hypothesis to affirmation. They are perfectly happy with the explanations provided by science. Like Laplace, they have no need for the ‘God hypothesis’ and equate the scientific attitude with agnosticism, if not with outright atheism.27 Again we have the fundamentalist claim that scientific enquiry means total explanation of the universe without recourse to the supernatural. However, there is something even more striking here. De Duve is honest enough to admit that this concept of scientific enquiry is not an a priori position but one that scientists should be prepared to abandon. Yet he thinks that this should be done only if they are ‘faced with facts that defy every attempt at rational explanation’. Here is a clear admission that, for many, science is practically inseparable from a metaphysical commitment to an agnostic or atheistic viewpoint. Indeed, philosopher Paul Kurtz thinks that the naturalism flows from science rather than being a priori: ‘What is common to naturalistic philosophy is its commitment to science. Indeed, naturalism might be defined in its more general sense as the philosophical generalizations of the methods and conclusions of the sciences.’28 But back to de Duve. If ‘supernatural intervention’ is to be equated with ‘defying every attempt at rational explanation’ then ‘supernatural’ implies ‘non-rational’. Secondly, it implies that science is co-extensive with rationality. To anyone who works in the humanities, and, in particular to anyone who has engaged in serious theological reflection, this will seem quite absurd – a stunning example of scientistic hubris. De Duve then honestly admits that many scientists ‘equate the scientific attitude with agnosticism, if not with outright atheism’. In order to make this move de Duve suggests they are following Laplace. This is once more a failure to see that explanation comes in

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different forms. Laplace was correctly responding to Napoleon in saying that his mathematical calculations did not need God. He was not responding to the question whether the universe was itself the result of intelligent agency. Other scientists go even further than de Duve and admit that their worldview is a priori. Immunologist George Klein says that his atheism is not based on science, but is an a priori faith commitment. Commenting on a letter in which one of his friends described him as an agnostic, he writes: ‘I am not an agnostic. I am an atheist. My attitude is not based on science, but rather on faith [. . .] The absence of a Creator, the non-existence of God is my childhood faith, my adult belief, unshakable and holy.’29 Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin agrees: Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs [. . .] in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment [. . .] to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.30 This is perhaps the most remarkable and simultaneously the most honest example of a fundamentalist attitude to science to be found anywhere in the literature. Lewontin admits that his materialism does not derive from science but rather shapes his definition of science. Lewontin also buys into the ‘conflict thesis’ that there is a struggle between ‘science and the supernatural’. He then immediately contradicts himself by admitting that science carries no compulsion within itself to force materialism upon us. This supports the contention that the real battle is not so much between science and faith in God, but rather between a materialistic, or more broadly, a naturalistic worldview and a supernaturalistic, or theistic, worldview.

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That it is Lewontin’s dogmatic antipathy to a Creator and not his science that lies behind his worldview is revealed in his next statement: ‘Moreover that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.’ Lewontin’s materialistic-science net is deliberately designed not to catch God. But that means, of course, that its use leaves the question of God’s existence completely open. And yet materialistic science often claims to have proved that God does not exist! We may illustrate this in the following way: if we deliberately design an apparatus only to be able to detect light in the visible part of the spectrum, it would be foolish to argue on the basis of experiments using our machine that infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays or Gamma-rays did not exist. It would be a foregone conclusion that we did not detect them, since our machine was deliberately designed not to be able to. Analogously, if we deliberately craft our science to exclude God a priori, it is then foolish to argue that our science has led us to be atheists. We would emphasise at this juncture that we are not suggesting that Lewontin and others who share an a priori commitment to materialism do not do good science. That would be incorrect. Excellent science can be and is certainly done both by materialists and theists and others, irrespective of their worldview. Indeed, it is important to realise that when it comes to the scientific study of the way things operate (which is the main body of science), as distinct from the way they originate, worldview assumptions play very little role whatsoever. What we are arguing is the importance of recognising the limitations that worldview presuppositions put on what can be logically deduced from investigations based on them. All of this has the effect of blurring the distinction between science and worldview leading to a conflation of scientism and science which provides fertile ground for scientific fundamentalism. In particular one casualty of the scientistic view is the widespread conviction that, whatever our precise definition of science, it is or should be principally concerned with the Socratic principle of following evidence no matter where it leads. How different that attitude is from feeling ‘forced by our a priori adherence to material causes’ to accept ‘patent absurdity’ and ‘insubstantiated just-so stories’. Indeed, I have heard many a scientist complain of the absurdities and just-so stories associated with religious fundamentalism. The pot calling the kettle black?

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Scientism and Ethics Albert Einstein, like Medawar, held that science was not applicable to every domain – ethics for instance. In a discussion on science and religion in Berlin in 1930, he said that our sense of beauty and our religious instinct are: ‘tributary forms in helping the reasoning faculty towards its highest achievements. You are right in speaking of the moral foundations of science, but you cannot turn round and speak of the scientific foundations of morality [. . .] Every attempt to reduce ethics to scientific formulae must fail.’31 Richard Feynman, a physics Nobel laureate, shared Einstein’s view: Even the greatest forces and abilities don’t seem to carry any clear instructions on how to use them. As an example, the great accumulation of understanding as to how the physical world behaves only convinces one that this behaviour has a kind of meaninglessness about it. The sciences do not directly teach good or bad.32 Elsewhere he states: ‘ethical values lie outside the scientific realm’.33 Even Richard Dawkins has, up until recently, espoused a similar view: ‘It is pretty hard to defend absolute morals on anything other than religious grounds.’ He also admits that you cannot get ethics from science: ‘Science has no methods for deciding what is ethical.’34 Nonetheless, scientific fundamentalism must disagree by definition and attempt to extend its sphere of influence into ethics. Sam Harris makes the attempt, as indicated by the subtitle of his book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values.35 Dawkins endorses this book and says that it has persuaded him to change his mind. Harris claims to have found a way around Hume’s celebrated claim that it is impossible to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. I am not suggesting that science cannot help us to make ethical judgements. For instance, knowing about how much pain animals feel can help shape judgements on animal testing. But the judgement is made on the basis of a prior moral conviction, that pain and misery is bad. Science can tell us that if you put strychnine in your grandmother’s tea it will kill her. Science cannot tell you whether you ought or ought not to do so in order to get your hands on her property. As cosmologist

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George Ellis points out, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics and meaning are outside the competence of science – ‘there is no experiment that says an act is good or bad’.36 Harris’ attempt to get ethics from science is not convincing. He writes: ‘We simply must stand somewhere. I am arguing that, in the moral sphere, it is safe to begin with the premise that it is good to avoid behaving in such a way as to produce the worst possible misery for every one.’37 Thus Harris begins with a moral conviction (in fact, as a basis for his own restatement of utilitarianism), and then brings his science to bear on deciding on whether a given situation conforms to it. That is a very different matter from his claim that science can determine human values.38 Biologist P. Z. Myers comments: I don’t think Harris’s criterion – that we can use science to justify maximizing the well-being of individuals – is valid. We can’t. We can certainly use science to say how we can maximize wellbeing, once we define well-being [. . .] although even that might be a bit more slippery than he portrays it. Harris is smuggling in an unscientific prior in his category of well-being.39 Harris’s response to this is illuminating: To use Myer’s formulation, we must smuggle in an ‘unscientific prior’ to justify any branch of science. If this isn’t a problem for physics, why should it be a problem for a science of morality? Can we prove, without recourse to any prior assumptions, that our definition of “physics” is the right one? No, because our standards of proof will be built into any definition we provide.40 Quite so; but if the unscientific prior involves a moral assumption, then Harris cannot claim to deduce morality from science. Harris is still trying to get, as C. S. Lewis put it: ‘a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premises in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible’.41 It is well to bear in mind that other attempts have been made to allow science to invade the field of ethics that have resulted, for

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instance, in the unspeakable horrors of Social Darwinism. In this connection, it is worth quoting John Horgan’s Globe and Mail review of Sam Harris’s attempt to derive ethics from science. Horgan, it should be noted, regards Harris as one of his ‘favourite religion-bashers’ and yet he writes: My second, more serious objection to Harris’s thesis42 stems from my knowledge of past attempts to create what he calls a ‘science of human flourishing’. Just 100 years ago, Marxism and eugenics struck many reasonable people as brilliant, fact-based schemes for improving human well-being. These pseudo-scientific ideologies culminated in two of the most lethal regimes in history, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Harris repeatedly insists that we shouldn’t rule out the scientific revelation of an objectively true, universal morality, just because it isn’t possible yet. As long as this achievement is possible in principle, he says, we shouldn’t worry that it still isn’t possible in practice. But we live in the world of practice, where even the smartest, best-informed, bestintentioned people make terrible mistakes. I therefore fear the practical consequences of a scientific movement to derive a universal morality.43 Cosmologist George Ellis’ comment on Social Darwinism is apt: [It] has been one of the most evil movements in the history of humanity, causing far more deaths than any other ideology has done.44 And the fact that one is able to say that it is evil shows that there are standards of ethics outside those provided by evolutionary biology. There is, of course, a substantial literature on the evolutionary rise of altruism, but as a historical fact the influence of evolutionary theory on ethics in practice has been to provide theoretical support for eugenics and Social Darwinism, not for any movement of caring for others. The theoretical ideas in support of the evolutionary rise of altruism have had no discernible effect on public behaviour; and ultimately this is because they explain ethics away, rather than providing a foundation for ethics.45

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Scientism’s Fatal Flaws There are lessons to be learned from this. For today, not only the academy, but also western culture is threatened with domination by an all-pervading scientism that holds naturalism to be the default philosophy. Dissenters from this view are all too readily written off as religious fundamentalists. The irony is however that scientism suffers from two fundamental defects – firstly, it is logically self-contradictory and, secondly, it threatens the validity of science itself. The self-contradictory nature of the fundamentalist dictum that ‘science is the only way to truth’ is a matter of elementary logic. For the statement ‘science is the only way to truth’ is not a statement or result of science. It is a statement about science. If, however, science is the only way to truth, then this statement must be false. It is therefore logically incoherent. The second flaw is related to the first. Naturalism’s story is that the human mind on which we rely to do science is the product of an unguided, mindless natural process. The problem then is, if that is really the case, why should we then trust the mind? After all, if we knew that the computer we are about to use was the end product of a mindless unguided process we would not trust it for a moment. Charles Darwin thought of this difficulty which is frequently referred to as ‘Darwin’s Doubt’: ‘With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy’.46 John Gray, Professor Emeritus of the History of European Thought at London University, has this in mind when he writes: ‘Modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth.’47 The tension that appears here is not, it should be noted, between science and religion. It is a tension between the desire to have science based on reliable human cognitive faculties and the undercutting of that reliability by a naturalistic belief that insists that human cognition is an unforeseen consequence of mindless unguided processes. Alvin Plantinga sums up the argument as follows:

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If Dawkins is right that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes, then he has given us strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties and therefore inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce – including Dawkins’ own science and his atheism. His biology and his belief in naturalism would therefore appear to be at war with each other in a conflict that has nothing at all to do with God.48 A further exploration of this argument is due to Thomas Nagel. His book Mind and Cosmos has the explosive subtitle: ‘Why the materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false’. He explains the grounds for his scepticism: My skepticism is not based on religious belief,49 or on a belief in any definite alternative. It is just a belief that the available scientific evidence, in spite of the consensus of scientific opinion, does not in this matter rationally require us to subordinate the incredulity of common sense. That is particularly true of the origin of life.50 Later he writes: If the mental is not itself merely physical, it cannot be fully explained by physical science [. . .] Evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn’t take any of our convictions seriously including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends.51 That is, naturalism undermines the foundations of the very rationality that is needed to construct or understand or believe in any kind of argument whatsoever – let alone a scientific one. Scientific fundamentalism espousing a ‘one size fits all’ naturalism would therefore appear not merely to shoot itself in the foot but in the brain.

Notes 1. EMBO Rep. 2005 December; 6(12): 1106– 9. doi: 10.1038/sj.embor.7400589 2. J. Cornwell, Darwin’s Angel (London: Profile Books, 2007), p. 95.

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3. A. Jha, ‘Peter Higgs criticises Richard Dawkins over anti-religious “fundamentalism”’, Guardian (26 December 2012). 4. This conference was extensively covered in a special 50th year edition of New Scientist (18 November 2006). 5. http://www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/belfast.html (accessed 11 March 2015). 6. Harris, S., The End of Faith (London: The Free Press, 2005), pp. 52 – 3. 7. Jha, A., ‘Peter Higgs criticises Richard Dawkins over anti-religious “fundamentalism”’, Guardian (26 December 2012). 8. Ibid. 9. M. Stenmark, ’Scientism’, in J. Wentzel Vrede van Huyssteen (ed.) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion (Detroit: Thomson Gale. 2003) p. 783. 10. S. J. Gould, ‘Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge’, Scientific American 267/1: 118– 21 (July 1992); reprinted in L. R. Hughes (ed.), Reviews of Creationist Books (Berkeley, CA: The National Center for Science Education, Inc., 1992), pp. 79 – 84. 11. See n.4. 12. B. Russell, Religion and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). 13. J. Cornwell (ed.), Nature’s Imagination – The Frontiers of Scientific Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 125. 14. S. Hawking and L. Mlodinow, The Grand Design (London: Bantam Press, 2010), p. 5. 15. www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/has-physics-made-philos ophy-and-religion-obsolete/256203/ (accessed 11 March 2015). 16. P. Medewar, Advice to a Young Scientist (New York: Basic Books, 1981). 17. Ibid. 18. rationallyspeaking.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/lawrence-krauss-another-physicistwith.html (accessed 11 March 2015). 19. P. Medawar, Advice to a Young Scientist (London: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 31; see also his book The Limits of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 66. 20. R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 21. I. Hutchinson, Monopolising Knowledge (Belmont, Mass.: Fias Publishing, 2011). 22. P. Clarke (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 762. 23. Spaemann interviewed by Wirtschaftswoche (August 2007). My translation. 24. C. A. Russell, ‘The conflict metaphor and its social origins’, Science and Christian Belief 1: 3–26 (1989). 25. R. Laughlin, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down (New York: Basic Books, 2005), pp. 168– 9. 26. J. A. Campbell and S. C. Meyer, Darwinism, Design and Public Education (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2003), p. 195. 27. C. R. de Duve, Life Evolving (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 284.

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28. P. Kurtz, Philosophical Essays in Pragmatic Naturalism (New York: Prometheus Books, 1990), p. 12. 29. G. Klein, The Atheist in the Holy City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990) p. 203. 30. Review of C. Sagan, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, New York Review of Books (9 January 1997). 31. For this and Einstein’s stance on religion and science see the definitive work of M. Jammer, Einstein and Religion (New York: Princeton University Press, 1999). The citation here is from p. 69. 32. R. P. Feynman, The Meaning of it All (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 32. 33. R. Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain (London: Phoenix, 2004), p. 39. 34. S. Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2010). 35. Clarke, Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, p. 760. 36. Ibid., p. 43. 37. S. Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (London: Black Swan, 2012), p. 39. 38. Ibid., p. 189. Perhaps Harris is vaguely aware of this himself since, towards the end of his book, he attenuates the claim of his cover sub-title to the lesser and very different ‘claim that science could have something important to say about values’. 39. scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/05/sam_harris_v_sean_carroll.php? (accessed 11 March 2015). 40. www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/a-science-of-morality_b_567185.html (accessed 11 March 2015). 41. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940). 42. Horgan’s first objection is that he disagrees with Harris about Hume: ‘Hume was right: The realm of ought is qualitatively different from the realm of is.’ J. Horgan, ‘Book review: The Acid Test for Doing the Right Thing’, The Globe and Mail (8 October 2010). 43. Ibid., www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/book-review-the-morallandscape-how-science-can-determine-human-values-by-sam-harris/article 1749446/page2/ (accessed 11 March 2015). 44. Ellis here cites R. Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 45. Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, p. 761. 46. Letter from Charles Darwin to William Graham, 1881, Darwin Correspondence Project Letter 13230. 47. J. Gray, Straw Dogs (London: Granta Books, 2002), p. 26. 48. For the detail of this argument see plato.stanford.edu/entries/religion-science/ (accessed 11 March 2015). 49. Nagel is an atheist. 50. T. Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 6. 51. Ibid., p. 27.

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Bibliography Campbell, J. A., and S. C. Meyer, Darwinism, Design and Public Education (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2003). Clarke, P., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Cornwell, J., Nature’s Imagination – The Frontiers of Scientific Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). —— Darwin’s Angel (London: Profile Books, 2007). Dawkins, R., The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). —— A Devil’s Chaplain (London: Phoenix, 2004) . de Duve, C. R., Life Evolving (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Feynman, R. P., The Meaning of it All (London: Penguin, 2007). Gray, J., Straw Dogs (London: Granta Books, 2002). Harris, S., The End of Faith (London: The Free Press, 2005). Hawking, S., and L. Mlodinow, The Grand Design (London: Bantam Press, 2010). Hutchinson, I., Monopolising Knowledge (Belmont, Mass.: Fias Publishing, 2011). Jammer, M., Einstein and Religion (New York: Princeton University Press, 1999). Klein, G., The Atheist in the Holy City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). Kurtz, P., Philosophical Essays in Pragmatic Naturalism (New York: Prometheus Books, 1990). Laughlin, R., A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down (New York: Basic Books, 2005). Lewis, C. S., The Abolition of Man (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940). Medawar, P., Advice to a Young Scientist (London: Harper and Row, 1979). Nagel, T., Mind and Cosmos, Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Russell, B., Religion and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). Weikart, R., From Darwin to Hitler (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

EPILOGUE Linda Woodhead

In the Western imagination today the dominant image of a fundamentalist is that of a dangerous fanatic, always male, usually Christian or Islamic. In one hand he grasps a holy book; in the other he may hold a Kalashnikov. He treats scripture as inerrant, and wants to impose it on others. Christian fundamentalists may rest content with ordering their households and communities, but Muslims seek to subjugate the whole of society to God’s law. This is the ‘frontstage’ of fundamentalism, the image which is circulated by mass media, and which helps create what it depicts. It is not ‘wrong’, any more than a caricature is wrong, but it is highly selective, and leaves out as much as it includes. Its focus falls on what is most immediately threatening to those who seek to contain it: violent masculinity of an irrational kind that threatens peaceful societies and seeks to undermine liberal democratic values; scriptural interpretation that rejects established religious authorities and scholarship. As this volume suggests, however, fundamentalism includes a great deal more. The majority of fundamentalists are not adult males, but women and children. Only a minority wish to establish theocracies, and very few resort to violence. Fundamentalists certainly have distinctive ways of interpreting the scriptures, but few spend most of their time doing so – they have other things to do all day. As Karen Armstrong notes, an unfortunate consequence of ratcheting up the difference between fundamentalism and other forms of religion, culture and

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sociality is ultimately to render it alien and inexplicable. How on earth could anyone hold such implausible beliefs or do such terrible things? The frontstage image can explain neither the appeal of fundamentalism nor its ability to retain loyalties; it has to resort to discredited explanations like ‘brainwashing’ and ‘radicalisation’. As Martin Percy suggests, the academic study of fundamentalism has a closer relationship to the frontstage image of fundamentalism than it might like to admit. It has often treated fundamentalism as wholly other, a bounded phenomenon which can be captured by a timeless definition. It has expended great effort in critiquing how fundamentalism reads scriptures, has paid most attention to men, and devotes great attention to the few who employ violence. Again, none of this is ‘wrong’, but there are other studies and approaches that can broaden the picture. This volume shows that the study of fundamentalism is now a mature field involving many disciplines, and dealing with many different regions and religions. In its breadth and scope it helps to bring into focus not only the frontstage of fundamentalism but also the neglected backstage, and in doing so helps us see both in a clearer light.

A Visit to the Backstage of Fundamentalism To introduce the backstage, let me begin with the research which first made me aware of very different faces of fundamentalism from those I had heard about. My dawning awareness came in the early years of the new millennium when I was part of a team inspecting a fundamentalist Bible College in the American Midwest. I followed this up with more intentional research amongst fundamentalist Christians in Britain and the southern United States in various spells after that and, in 2014, carried out more limited research with ultraOrthodox Jews in Israel. My growing understanding of fundamentalism was also deepened by reading some of the excellent studies of fundamentalist communities, many of them ethnographic, which are discussed in this volume. I immediately became aware that one of the most striking features of such communities, almost irrespective of the kind of religion involved, is their commitment to a deep domesticity, and the premium they place on hierarchical domestic orderliness. Home and family are absolutely

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central for both women and men – and of course children – and I found that their attachment to ideals of Godly domesticity helped to explain a great deal about the appeal of fundamentalism, as well as about the ways in which it sustains and perpetuates itself. Speaking to sophisticated young Israeli men who had emigrated to find work in the United States but returned regularly to their native city of Haifa about why they maintained strong connections with ultra-Orthodoxy, for example, I discovered the theme of the ideal, pure and unsullied family to be recurrent. Though these young men lived in the United States, they did not wish to conform to its liberal values – ‘I sleep in LA but I live in Israel’. They wanted to establish ‘proper’ families, in which their children would be raised pure and uncorrupted by the modern West. They sought for their children the sort of simple pleasures they had themselves enjoyed in Israel, and wanted to avoid their being spoilt by computer games and an excess of expensive toys. ‘We have no smart phones in my house, they are only for work. My boys play hide and seek and games like we used to’. These young men were intent on creating homes and family lives which were purer, more wholesome and orderly. I experienced for myself the pull of the large, orderly, warm, stable family when meeting fundamentalists in the United States. As a visitor it was undeniably pleasant to visit their tidy, cared for, welcoming homes, homes, which were always magnificently decorated according to the season and festival of the time. There would be home-baked goods on the table, inquisitive children all round, cheery conversation and lavish hospitality. Women spoke positively of the safety that came from living in such a stable environment, relatively secure from threats of divorce, single-motherhood and poverty facing many women in ‘secular’ America. They pitied their secular sisters whom they viewed as pressured to take paid work, vulnerable to marital instability, and unrecognised for their true dignity and worth as wives and mothers. There was also a great deal of mutual support between neighbourly households and members of the same church, and a lot of shared activities like picnics and other family gatherings. In mixed gatherings, there was nearly always informal segregation of the sexes. Even in the home men had their own ‘dens’, tasks, and hobbies. Although families usually went to church together, women were generally more pious, and several men told me that it was their wives who spent ‘most time with

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Jesus’. My own status at the time as an unmarried professional woman caused a fair bit of confusion about where I belonged; I often ended up an honorary member of the male rather than the female clusters, but remained an object of somewhat concerned curiosity to both. Business and money-earning often has a family dimension as well, though this varies across different religions. Amongst Christians men are usually the breadwinners, whereas in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities women are more likely to be employed in family businesses to support their husbands in full-time study of the scriptures – an arrangement that is possible in countries like Britain and Israel because of the additional support given to large families by state welfare. Reproducing the family is a major concern for religious, personal, and economic reasons. Motherhood is women’s primary role, and families are often large. Children are socialised from an early age to become good wives or husbands, their innocent minds set upon the roles they must one day inhabit and the duties and responsibilities that will fall on them – above all on boys – to form their own Godly households. All the communities I studied were wary of entrusting their children to ‘secular’ forms of education, and preferred to home school or send children to schools that would offer Godly instruction. This domestically-focused religion is part and parcel of an ordering of authority in which men are heads of household, women their indispensable life-long companions and partners in the task of parenting, and children are under the authority of father, mother and other adults. The family is a primary focus of loyalty, with intimacy outside it being largely restricted to gender-segregated groups, or to family-to-family relations. Sexual intimacy outside of marriage is strictly forbidden, even though it does, of course, occasionally occur. The image of paternal authority – of a father who exercises responsible ‘headship’ over his family – is pervasive. It is applied to God as much as to man, to politics as much as religion, to piety as much as domesticity, and it is perhaps the central element in the symbolic logic of fundamentalism. Although it is dangerous to generalise about the God(s) of fundamentalism, the paternal theological theme came through in my own research, particularly amongst Christians. For both men and women God ‘the Father’ was both authority figure and loving and caring parent. His sovereign, encompassing power and care were absolutely central to

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their personal and social lives. It was the Father God who gave the blessing of children and entrusted parents with their care, and the Father who delegated paternal authority to men, and maternal care to women. God was in control, and would take care of all things, even when His ways seemed mysterious. ‘There are rules’, a Haredi Jew told me, ‘and if we live by the rules everything will be OK, and if we don’t it all goes wrong.’ The benevolent divine purpose, encompassing self, society and world, and linking one’s own life directly to God’s purposes, provided an explanatory, sheltering and sustaining undergirding to the whole of life, and is a further element that helps explain fundamentalism’s appeal. It is therefore a mistake to dismiss the ‘private’ backstage of fundamentalism as secondary to the ‘public’ frontstage. Each depends on the other. Almost all the chapters in this volume note how fundamentalism is distinguished by its acute critical angle towards ‘modernity’, its sharp differentiation. As well as being marked by more frontstage features like the authority accorded to literal scriptural interpretation, this difference is lived out every day in families, businesses, gendered identities. When fundamentalists lash out at ‘secular modernity’, it is very often the difference from their own domestic orderings that they focus upon: unruly and spoilt children; drunk and sexually promiscuous women; divorce and family breakdown; a deficit of care and concern for the elderly; lack of respect and deference to elders; the malign influence of feminism; rampant homosexuality – all signs of wilful departure from the natural order of things that a just and loving God has ordained.

Back to the Frontstage One of the clearest themes of this book is fundamentalism’s constitutive relationship to modernity – even when it repudiates it most fiercely. Peter Neumann spells this out in detail. Rather than being rooted in religious and theological traditions, and traditional ways of living, interpreting scripture, and worshipping God, it is a reflex from within modernity which partakes – both knowingly and unknowingly – of many features of the modernity it rejects. Older forms of religious separatism and sectarianism also rejected ‘the world’, or particular aspects of the world, but not the secular-modern world – and by no means always in favour of the family (rather than asceticism and sexual abstinence, for example).

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It follows that different fundamentalisms can be differentiated by the different versions of modernity they reject and the different visions of the Godly society they embrace. For ultra-Orthodoxy, as discussed by Laura Janner-Klausner, it is the modernity that created the death camps and sought to wipe out the Jewish people that is repudiated, and the decimated Hasidic Judaism of eighteenth century eastern Europe is recreated. For American Christian fundamentalism, it is liberal, multicultural, ‘gay-loving’, hedonistic and cosmopolitan America that is the object of revulsion, and an idealised frontier society that lies at the heart of their understanding of Godly society. As James Dunn, Martyn Percy and many others show, what all fundamentalisms reject is modernity’s historical and historical-critical sensibility. There is no sense of the pathdependent contingency of things, nor of context-dependence and limitation, still less of any kind of historical progress. Fundamentalist time is telescoped into a perfect past to which the present seeks to relate directly, until such time as it is fully realised by God. It is no surprise that fundamentalists are wary of modern forms of education, and particularly of the humanities and social sciences with their integral sense of history. The rejection of evolution is part of the same instinct. Applied scientific and technical subjects have more appeal, and it has been noted how, for example, spokesmen of Islamist fundamentalism are often doctors, engineers and technicians. The view of the world as governed by timeless laws is acceptable to fundamentalism in a way an historical or evolutionary account is not. Here again we see fundamentalism’s modern roots, for it is a religious version of positivism, rooted in positivism’s early twentieth-century heyday, and sharing its commitment to unitary, non-context-dependent, publicly-accessible truth. This frontstage account of God’s timeless laws is shaped by the backstage reality of fundamentalist life. Fundamentalists’ distinctive ways of reading scripture have a dialectical relationship to domesticallyinflected oppositions to ‘secular modernity’. Thus opposition to (a particular construct of) modernity frames the way in which scripture is interpreted, and the way in which scripture is interpreted frames the way in which modernity is constructed. To give an example, many fundamentalists believe that the scriptures are not just strongly profamily, but strongly pro-the-kind-of-family-they-uphold, and that some of the most inviolable scriptural injunctions are – for example – those

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concerning sex and marriage. They therefore justify their familial piety on scriptural grounds, and ground fierce opposition to homosexuality, sex before marriage, and female authority in the sort of a literal reading of the plain sense of scripture that James Dunn discusses. But the way scripture is read is in turn grounded in the kinds of family structure it supports. (In saying this, I take for granted that all the scriptures of the world’s religions are open to very different readings – much of the New Testament, for example, being indifferent or hostile to family structures and relationships.) There is therefore a circular and mutually-reinforcing social-scriptural mode of construction in fundamentalism, a loop into which it is extremely difficult for any other considerations to break in, whether they are scriptural or socialexperiential. This is how fundamentalism retains its plausibility; on its own, its dogmatic frontstage would be incredible, but allied to the everyday lived realities and reinforcements of social and domestic life, it makes much more sense. Though portrayed as timelessly true, fundamentalist readings of scripture are distinctively modern in their individualism and their detraditionalised character – indeed it is this which generates the sense of timeless truth in the first place. For most fundamentalism, scripture speaks to each individual without the necessary mediation of a priest, tradition, or special learning. It speaks directly and plainly, and even works miracles – in the hearts, minds and lives of those who hear and obey. This is a different approach from most pre-modern scripturallybased forms of religion, which give special authority to learned exegetes and an endlessly developing and highly complex tradition – or competing traditions – of interpretation. Many forms of fundamentalism, including much Christian and Islamic fundamentalism dispense with such tradition completely. Authority resides in the space of encounter between God/scripture and the individual. Even when tradition retains a higher level of respect, as in ultra-Orthodox Judaism, the modern-individualist tendency is apparent in the way that the majority of ultra-Orthodox men wish to become learned interpreters, rather than leaving that task to a tiny elite. By considering fundamentalism outside the more scriptural religions, however, this volume also reminds us why fundamentalism does not depend upon a certain way of reading scriptures. As Julius Lipner explains in relation to Hinduism, other factors such as the differentiation

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from modernity and from competing religious traditions, and commitment to certain sacred symbols, spaces and moral orders, may be as important. Fundamentalisms draw very clear, non-negotiable, lines in the sand. What is good and Godly can be defined not only by scriptures, but by sacred symbols, holy places, charismatic leaders, and various imagined forms of ethnic purity, all of which are made real in backstage instantiations. With its wide-angle lens on fundamentalism, the book also reminds us that although separation and differentiation are defining marks, they take very different forms in different religions. Differentiation is a basic stance of fundamentalism, but its forms and outworkings vary hugely, and are further complicated by age, gender and other internal differences. Peter Herriot explains this both in relation to individual and group identity, and how they are constructed, defended and maintained. Strict separation is actually quite rare in fundamentalism. Selective accommodations are more common, combined with clear boundary lines and fierce critique of what lies outside them. Several contributors show how accommodations are common in relation to modern technology and aspects of local and global economies and business practice. An alternative differentiating stance is the attempted co-option, takeover and transformation of aspects of the modern world, including competing forms and institutions in the worlds of both religion and politics. These may lead to frontstage, foregrounded attempts at conquest and armed struggle, and/or to terrorism and destruction. As Herriot and others remind us, fundamentalists are not only opposed to their wider societies, they are often even more vigorously opposed to competing ‘liberal’ forms of religion, particularly those close to them. Thus fundamentalist Christians despise and oppose other kinds of Christians, the ultra-Orthodox shun other forms of the Jewish faith, and so on. But the critique is always that these forms have conformed too closely to the modern secular world, have ‘sold out to it’. They have taken over its liberal individualism and exchanged the clear teachings of God for a wishy-washy fudge with secular modernity.

Threat The final issue with which the volume deals, though more peripherally, is the threat of fundamentalism. A backstage–frontstage approach helps

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us to consider the issue in the round. For all its fiery rhetoric and denunciation of what lies outside, most fundamentalism is peaceful. As Laura Janner-Klausner notes in relation to Jewish fundamentalism, the quietists are just as important as the activists. And most activists do not resort to violence, but try to bring about change within the context of law and order. Given the priority that is given to establishing safe and orderly households and communities with robust forms of ‘policing’ by way of social sanctions and more powerful internalised, emotional, and religious ones, fundamentalism could even be viewed as making a positive contribution to social order. Certainly, forms of completely separatist fundamentalist community, like ultra-Orthodox Jews, are financially supported as well as tolerated in many Western and other countries. The view that fundamentalism is inherently dangerous makes the mistake of taking the frontstage image as a true reflection of the whole, or of thinking that holding certain ideas necessarily leads to certain kinds of action. As Ed Husain acknowledges, however, the study of Islamic radicalisation has led to a consensus that there is no such ‘conveyor belt’ to violence. Many additional factors have to come into play, including above all socialisation into networks of violence. Outside of communities that live with violence – such as those in Palestine – fundamentalist communities may actually serve as a protection against terrorist violence, partly because of their close watchfulness over all members of their community, their ability to contain separatist views, and their appeal to accepted religious authorities to counter interpretations which sanction the use of violence. Nevertheless, as Husain insists, whilst a fundamentalist ideology does not necessarily lead to violence, it can provide a powerful motivation and legitimation for it. Belief in unique possession of the truth can support contempt or hatred for all outsiders, a crusading zeal to convert them, or to an urgent desire to eliminate or subordinate them in order to establish Godly order. Moreover, the belief and practice of male headship can slide into a justification of masculine domination of subject and ‘weaker’ people, and a sense of obligation to guide and control others. The central importance of appeals to machismo, and associations of masculinity with violence, have been noted as important factors in radicalisation. None of this constitutes a ‘natural’ development of fundamentalism, but these are elements within it which enculturation

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into violence can play upon (as it can upon secular ideologies of various kinds, of course). The attachments of fundamentalism to both nationalist projects (like Zionism or Hindutva), or global-imperial ones (like an Islamic caliphate) are also significant factors. As with all escalations of violence, the violation of boundaries may lead to violence and, once violence erupts, people are forced to clarify those boundaries, choose sides and defend them. Again, there is nothing necessarily religious, about this, and similar remarks can be made of football hooliganism. What fundamentalism can add are political and sometimes economic grievances and goals, sometimes tied up with ethnic factors, plus support from scriptures including the idea of a divine destiny. Combined with heroic individualism and the paraphernalia of secular military machismo, this can have deadly outcomes. As to ways of countering the threat, as Herriot and other contributors note, the most counter-productive way to deal with fundamentalists is to attack them. Given that fundamentalism depends upon a strong dichotomy between us and them, and views secular modernity as inherently opposed, denunciation by perceived agents of the latter just strengthens its resolve, hardens its boundaries, and proves its sense that ‘they are out to get us’. One effect of the circulation of frontstage images of fundamentalist violence, particularly in relation to terrorism, is to ‘big it up’ and make it seem more heroic and exciting to precisely the sorts of men who are likely to be attracted. Similarly, the joining up of the dots of varied fundamentalist groups to produce a unified global threat oversimplifies and exaggerates what it seeks to contain. Whilst terrorism and violence have to be dealt with proportionately, stigmatising all fundamentalism is dangerously counter-productive, and an unfortunate consequence of dwelling too much on the frontstage and ignoring the more human and humanly-understandable backstage. This also has the effect of drawing such a sharp line between fundamentalism and other forms of religion and sociality that fundamentalism comes to seem entirely alien. The more challenging but more truthful approach to which this volume points us, is acknowledgement of human and religious continuities as well as differences. For fundamentalists share a great deal more with their fellow moderns – and the leaders of more mainstream religions – than either might like to admit. Like many of ‘us’, many of ‘them’ are keen on nice houses, large fridges, well-behaved

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children, stable family units, male leadership, good household finances, and more control over their own destinies. If we think of fundamentalism as a spectrum, which joins it to the larger religious communities fundamentalists seek to purify (with Orthodox Judaism, popular Hinduism, mainstream Protestantism, etc.), we also see more clearly the responsibility that ‘mainstream’ religious leaders have, and the influence they can wield. One of the interesting stories of recent times is the way in which many of these leaders have been pulled away from liberal religion and towards the (liberal end of) the fundamentalist spectrum in recent decades. A robust defence of tradition-based, democratic and liberal forms of religion has diminished, and the liberal direction of travel of many of the world’s religions in the 1960s and 1970s has been replaced by retrenchment, especially in relation to issues of gender, sexuality, scriptural authority and dogmatic definition. Whether this has aided or moderated the influence of stricter forms of fundamentalism is a moot point. It has certainly led to a conflation of the secular with ethical liberalism, and the religious with ethical conservatism, and led much of the media to tar religion in general with the brush of fundamentalism. Of course in saying all this, and in moving from backstage to frontstage, I have also shifted between empathetic insider and critical outsider. In relation to fundamentalism, neutrality is not an option. Either you are one of ‘them’, or you are one of ‘us’. Either you are part of God’s timeless and true order, or you are a dupe of the modern world. From a fundamentalist viewpoint, most people accept uncritically the modernist soup in which they swim. Only the saved have been caught by God, pulled out from its murky swirling waters, and placed on solid ground. By reminding us of the broader canvas of fundamentalism, its backstage as well as frontstage, we can understand this outlook and its appeal. To understand and even to empathise is not to be uncritical, it is the basis for appropriate critical appraisal and well-judged practical action.

INDEX

‘The Academy’, 2 Armed Islamic Group (GIA), 144 Authority, 11 – 12, 20, 29, 51 – 2, 54 – 8, 61 – 2, 98, 102, 148, 172– 3, 179 Authoritarianism, 29 Babri Masjid, 108 Bible. See also Scripture authority of, 11, 53 inerrancy, 22 infallible authority, 12, 56 inspiration and interpretation, 13 Biblicism, 51, 58 BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), 108 Caliphate, 72, 76, 178 Certainty, 10, 12, 16 – 18, 21, 22, 33, 40, 53, 76, 95, 102, 128 Chabad-Lubavitch, 84 –5 Children, 19, 82, 131, 141, 169, 171–3 Christian fundamentalism. See also Fundamentalism characteristics, 50 as dialectical, 62 eisegesis, 51 exegesis, 51 expression of, 62 –3 inerrancy, 51

liberalism, 63 mindset and faith, 59 – 60 modernity, 53 scripture, 53 – 8 sectarianism, 48 terms of reference, 48 –50 thinking of fundamentalist, 51 women role, in faiths and society, 52 Compromise, 20 – 1, 22, 55, 57, 62, 66, 87, 90 Conformity, 34 Darwin, Charles, Darwinism, 11, 13, 63, 143, 147, 149, 156, 162, 163 Darwin’s Doubt, 163 Social Darwinism, 143, 162 Domestic, 89, 170– 5 Dress codes, 34, 79 – 81 Enlightenment, 4 – 5, 11, 17, 28, 59, 80, 87 –8, 121– 3, 141 Haskalah, 80 Evangelical, 1, 14, 19, 21, 34, 49, 54– 5, 60 – 1, 63, 72, 122–3, 131 Evolution, 11, 143 Faith, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17 –18, 22, 31, 36, 48, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 63,

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65, 66, 69, 70 – 1, 95, 98 – 9, 102, 131– 2, 137, 143, 156 Family, 31, 36, 61, 75, 106– 7, 109, 125, 149, 170– 5, 179 Fascism, 2 Foundationalism, 10, 55 Fundamentalism costs of, 39 definition, 9 – 10, 27 – 9, 47 – 9 and emotions, 35 expression, 62 – 3 five pillars of, 54 hallmarks of, 61 – 4 history of the word, 1 home and family, 171–2 intolerance of plurality, 3 and liberalism, 2, 11, 48, 59, 63, 179 and modernity (see also Modernity), 4, 27 –8, 47– 9, 53 – 4, 57, 59, 62, 66, 81, 85, 95 – 6, ch. 7, 137– 41, 53, 173– 4, 176, 178 motivations for, 33, 35 neutrality, 4 personality, 29 psychology of, ch. 2 secularists and fundamentalists, 144 threat of, 176– 9 Fundamentalism project, 49 – 50 The Fundamentals, 1 –2, 10– 12, 22, 49 Gender, 89, 107, 125, 172– 3, 176, 179 Globalisation, 37 – 8 definition, 120 developing societies, 127– 8 insecurity in, 127–8 technology and, 124– 5 God, Scientism and concept of, 155 Goddess Sri-Lakshmi, 101 God in the Year 2000 (conference), 144 Haredi Judaism/Haredim demographic projections, 81 – 2 dress code, 81 Enlightenment and Emancipation, 80

‘Haredisation’ of mainstream Orthodoxy, 79 identity separation and reinforcement, 81 Messiah’s arrival, 78 – 9 political and economic influences, 87 – 8 political dynamics, 83– 4 secular education, 79, 82 Shtetl, 83 Sinai, 83 views of Torah and God, 78 women, role of, 81 –2 Harmonisation, 15 Hasidic Judaism, 85, 174 Headship, 19, 172, 177 Higher criticism, 11 Hinduism/Hindu, 3, ch. 6, 175 dharma, 107– 9 Hindutva, 102, 104– 10, 178 modernity in, 95 political, 100–10 scriptural, 96 – 100 Hindu Mahasabha, 103 Holocaust, 4, 79, 81, 83 – 84, 138 Homosexuality, 4, 20, 173, 175 Household, 19 – 20, 169, 171–2, 177, 179 Iman (faith), 70 –1 Inerrancy, 12, 16, 22, 51, 54, 55, 59, 63, 95, 99. See also Bible Christian fundamentalism, 51 Protestant fundamentalism, 12 scripture, 54 Indian National Congress, 104 Infallibility, 12, 51, 56 Inspiration, 12 – 13, 51, 54 Intolerance, 3, 9, 21 – 2, 144, 149 Islam/Islamism, 70 competitiveness, 71 Mawdudi, 71 organisations, 71 as political ideology, 71

INDEX sovereignty, 72 as statist, 71 under caliphate, 72 Islamic fundamentalism, 49 – 50, 69 – 71. See also Islam/Islamism; Salafism Islamic mysticism, 141 Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), 143– 4 Israel, 14, 19, 29, 50, 78 – 80, 82 – 90, 122, 130, 138, 144, 145, 170– 2 Jesus Christ, 10, 13, 15, 16, 52, 70 Jewish fundamentalism active fundamentalism, 77, 84 – 7 political and economic influences, 87 –8 quiescent fundamentalism, 77 – 84 Palestinian territories, 78 ultra-Orthodoxy, 77 –8 Jihad, 73, 75 – 6, 123– 4, 126, 128 Late modernity definition, 119– 20 developing societies, 127–8 economic and social changes, 125 ethnonationalist identities, 128 globalisation, 125– 6 insecurity in, 127–8 technology and control, 124– 5 Liberalism, 2, 11, 48, 59, 63, 179 Literal, 12 – 14, 18, 22, 47, 52, 54, 58, 59, 60, 73 – 6, 78, 96, 130, 137, 143, 173, 175 Luther, Martin, 13, 139 Masculinity, 5, 169, 177 Messiah, 78 – 9, 84 – 6 Messianic Orthodox Zionists modernity, 85 political and economic influences, 89 –90 West Bank settlement, 86 Metaphor, 3, 18, 61, 73, 123, 131 Modernism, 9– 11, 59, 96, 123

183

Modernity casualties of, 141 colonial subjugation, 139– 40 dialogue, 142 empiricism, 121 Enlightenment, 121–2 independence, 139 innovation, 139 jihad vs. McWorld, 123 –4 in Muslim world, 138 rationalism, 121 science of compassion, 141 violent methods used for, 140 in West, 139– 40 Muhammad, 70, 73 Muslim Brotherhood, 71 – 2, 144 Muslim League, 103 Muslims, 69 – 70. See also Islam/ Islamism; Salafism Myth, 13 – 14, 61, 64, 154 Naturalism, 163– 4 Newman, John Henry, 17 Plain sense, 12 – 14, 175 Political, Hinduism BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), 108 global geo-political arena, 101 Hindu Sama¯j, 108–9 militant nationalists, 108 polycentrism, 101 principles of dharma, 107 Sangh Parivar, 106, 108, 110 Savarkar’s vision, 105– 6 Politicisation, authenticity, search for, 129– 30 failure of secularism, 130 religious lifestyles and social realities, 130– 1 secular nationalism, 129 Power, 2, 21, 36 – 7, 38 – 9, 48, 54, 55, 57, 66, 78, 87, 102 Protestant fundamentalism beliefs, 14 – 15

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biblical texts, 18 – 19 church leadership, 19 – 20 faith with certainty, 17 – 18 fundamentalist attitude, 21 – 2 harmonisation, 15 inerrancy, 12 inspiration and revelation, 13 – 14 plain sense, 12 – 13 women role, in faiths and society, 51 Protestantism, orthodox beliefs of, 95 Purity, 39, 48, 50, 66, 75, 131, 176 Qur’an, 70– 2, 76 Rapture, 14 – 15 Rationalism, 121 Reason, 17, 53, 59, 93, 95, 97 – 9, 121– 2, 148 Religious revivalism, 49, 123 Revelation, 13 – 14, 56 Roman Catholicism, 12 Salafism, 70, 73 – 6, 123 ʿaqı¯da (creed), importance of, 74 literalism, 73 – 4 rejectionism, 74 Saudi Arabia, 75 shirk and bid‘a, notions of, 74 – 5 Wahhabism, links to, 73 Sayyid Qutb, 71, 140 Scientific fundamentalism essential nature of, 152 and nature of explanation, 153– 5 and worldview, 158– 9 Scientism, 149– 53 doctrinaire positivism, 152 and ethics, 160– 2 fatal flaws, 163– 4 God of the Gaps, 155– 6 philosophy and, 151 scientific expansionism, 150 Scofield Bible, 14 Scopes monkey trial, 11, 143

Scripture authority and inspiration, 54 – 5 biblical infallibility, 56 governance by hermeneutics, 57 identity of, 58 inerrancy of, 12 –13, 54 Islamist/Salafi interpretation, 75 – 6 Protestant fundamentalism, 16 – 17 scriptural Hinduism, 96 – 100 theory of revelation, 56 Secular, 2, 31, 33–4, 36, 49, 53, 66, 72, 75, 79–83, 85–9, 95, 104, 108, 110, 122, 129–31, 137–8, 140–1, 144, 148, 171–4, 176, 178–9 secularisation, 3, 28 secular nationalism, 129 Sharia, 70 – 1, 75 Six – Day War, 85 Social identity theory definition of social identity, 30 dominance and salience, 32 fundamentalist movements and their adherents, 31 – 2 modernising/late-modern societies, 31 multiple social situations, 30 Social psychology conformity, 34 differentiation, 33 – 4, 38 globalisation, 37 – 8 inequalities, 33 – 4 internal group culture, 39 motivation, 33, 35 narratives and emotions, 35 – 7 oppositional programmes, 39 Supernatural, 11, 155, 157– 8 ‘Tag Mechir’, Price Tag, 87 Toleration, 138– 9 Torah, 78, 80, 83 – 4 Ultra-Orthodoxy, 77– 9, 81 – 2, 87, 144, 170– 2, 174–7 Ultra-Orthodox Jews. See Haredi Judaism/Haredim

INDEX

185

Vedic fundamentalism, 97 Vedic Aryans, 103 Violence, 4 – 5, 9, 49, 70, 87, 89, 96, 108, 110, 129, 137, 169, 177– 8 Virgin birth, 10, 54, 55, 95 Vishnu-Narayana, 101 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), 102, 106– 8, 110 Hindu Sama¯j, 108– 9 militant nationalists of, 108 principles of dharma, 107 role of women, 107

West Bank of Jordan, 78, 85, 105–6 Women, role of, challenge to traditional patriarchy, 5 in church leadership, 19 fundamentalism amongst, 169 Haredi dress codes, 81 Haredi high birth rates, 81 – 2 modesty, 81, 109 Protestant fundamentalism, 36 secular modernity, 173 ‘traditional’ roles, 52 Women’s Record (Hale), 47

Wahhabism. 70, 73 – 4, 76. See also Salafism

Zionism, 50, 78, 85 – 7, 178

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FUNDAMENTALISMS

17. The Yezidis, Birgu¨l Ac
ikyildiz, 978 1 84885 274 7 18. Religion and Popular Music in Europe, Thomas Bossius, Andreas Ha¨ger and Keith Kahn-Harris (Eds), 978 1 84885 809 1 19. Radical Christianity in Palestine and Israel, Samuel J Kuruvilla, 978 1 84885 551 9 20. Making Spirits, Diana Espirito Santo and Nico Tassi (Eds), 978 1 84885 796 4 21. Faith and Revivalism in a Nordic Romani Community, David Thurfjell, 978 1 84885 928 9 22. Gemini and the Sacred, Kimberley C Patton, 978 1 84885 931 9 23. Muslim Minorities and Citizenship, Sean Oliver-Dee, 978 1 84885 388 1 24. Encounters with Islam, Malise Ruthven, 978 1 78076 023 0 25. Shi’i Islam and Identity, Lloyd Ridgeon, 978 1 84885 649 3 26. Reform and Modernity in Islam, Safdar Ahmed, 978 1 84885 735 3 29. Indian Philosophy, Jeffery D. Long, 978 1 78076 203 6 30. Preaching Islamic Revival, Susanne Olsson, 978 1 78076 390 3 31. Iranian Dualism and its Global Legacy, George J. Sieg, 978 1 78076 531 0 32. Ethnographies of Doubt, Mathijs Pelkmans (Ed), 978 1 84885 810 7 33. The Politics of Iconoclasm, James Noyes, 978 1 84885 565 6 34. The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil, Lissa McCullough, 978 1 78076 795 6 35. The Humble Sublime, Ronald F. Thiemann, 978 1 78076 744 4 36. The Three Sons of Abraham, Jacques B Doukhan (Ed), 978 1 78076 743 7 37. Hegel and the Art of Negation, Andrew W. Hass, 978 1 78076 557 0 38. Twenty-First Century Jihad, Elisabeth Kendall and Ewan Stein, 978 1 78076 916 5 39. Shi’i Sectarianism in the Middle East, Elisheva Machlis, 978 1 78076 720 8 40. Kant and the Meaning of Religion, Terry F. Godlove, 978 1 84885 528 1 41. Dharma, Veena R Howard and Rita D Sherma (Eds), 978 1 78453 263 5 42. Chinese Philosophy, Ronnie L Littlejohn, 978 1 78453 293 2 43. Christian-Muslim Relations in Egypt, Henrik Lindberg Hansen, 978 1 78453 203 1 44. Chinese Philosophy, Ronnie L Littlejohn, 978 1 78453 261 1

LIBRARY

OF MODERN

RELIGION

45. Dreams and Visions in the World of Islam, Elizabeth Sirriyeh, 978 1 78076 142 8 46. Sufis, Salafis and Islamists, Sadek Hamid, 978 1 78453 231 4 47. Fundamentalisms, James D G Dunn (Ed), 978 1 78076 950 9 48. Victorian Christianity at the Fin de Sie`cle, Frances Knight, 978 1 78076 891 5 49. Exploring the Bhagavata Purana, Ithamar Theodor, 978 1 78453 199 7 50. The Gu¨len Movement in Turkey, Caroline Tee, 978 1 78453 588 9

189