The Great Revival: Understanding Religious "Fundamentalism"

Within hours of the attack on the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, the final letters of hijacker Muhammad Atta, discovered in the trunk of a rental car parked at Dulles International Airport outside Washington D.C., were being dissected by journalists and TV pundits. As the new book Strong Religion tellingly observes, commentators almost uniformly characterized the mindset revealed in these notes as "chilling," "eerie," and "haunting." Once again, it seemed, Americans had been caught in a state of incomprehension: what kind of religious beliefs could propel people to murder thousands of innocent civilians?

Americans had experienced that same incomprehension, drawn out over a longer period of time, in 1979, when militant Iranian students took 52 American citizens hostage within the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Who were these people? What strange religious and political sentiments motivated them to do such things?

An almost identical sense of bewilderment must have struck many highly educated Americans during the early 1980s, when activists on behalf of the Moral Majority and other Protestant Christian groups suddenly became rather visible on the American political scene. This confusion, however, may have been followed by a collective, simultaneous "Aha" moment: of course, "fundamentalism" explained it all. After all, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority in 1979, actually proclaimed himself a fundamentalist, and those who supported the new upsurge of Christian conservatism seemed to share many of his religious views. Surely they must be fundamentalists too.

The five-volume, decade-long Fundamentalism Project was a major scholarly effort to see if there was such a sociological phenomenon as fundamentalism that might explain similarities, or at least "family resemblances," among so-called fundamentalist groups within several major world religions. A total of 75 different movements were examined by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists on several continents. The groups included had emerged from all of the world's major religions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam (both Sunni and Shi'ite), Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and neo-Confucianism. Strong Religion amounts to a concluding summation of the project's work.

FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

The volume's title is itself telling. The word "fundamentalisms" appears only after the colon. One reason, no doubt, is the plain inadequacy of the word. As the authors rather defensively admit, there are strong reasons for objecting to the term "fundamentalist." First, it has tended to be used in a pejorative way, denigrating almost anyone of convinced religious viewpoint. In addition, it is often carelessly linked to the word "terrorist," as though being a fundamentalist almost inevitably leads to violence. Moreover, strictly speaking, the name "fundamentalism" should be applied only to one particular movement within Protestantism that came into existence in the early twentieth century, inspired by a series of booklets that attacked theological modernism called The Fundamentals.

Another difficulty lies in applying the word "fundamentalist" to people of Muslim faith. That begs the question of the extent to which their beliefs are somehow more archaic than the beliefs of those with a supposedly more modern Muslim outlook. For this reason, Strong Religion agrees that Muslims who have been rather cavalierly labeled "fundamentalist" should instead be referred to as "Islamist," a more neutral term that has been carefully defined by scholars examining the phenomenon of Islamic radicalism or revivalism in different parts of the world.

The question remains: Can the family resemblances discerned in differing varieties of religious revivalism be described usefully as a "fundamentalist phenomenon"? This book argues forcefully that they can. It examines with some insight different aspects of religious communities that are commonly called fundamentalist. It refers to the "enclave culture," the tendency of so-called fundamentalist movements to see themselves as beleaguered minorities in an alien and hostile world. Some of the specific studies of religious movements are fascinating and informative, almost providing digressions from the sociological narrative. Readers who are not immediately familiar with militant Sikhism, or Buddhist "extremism" in Sri Lanka, or the haredi and Gush Emunim movements in Israel will learn much. There is also a pithy dissection of the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers in Iran. And the analysis of the distinctiveness of Sunni Islamic revivalism in contrast with the Shi'ite variety is genuinely useful.

TRUE BELIEVERS?

The larger issue raised by this effort to understand fundamentalism is the premise of the entire project: that such religious movements are "militant and highly focused antagonists of secularization." Many so-called fundamentalist movements are undoubtedly hostile to much of modernity. But the word "secularization" seems a bit loaded. It implies that increasing global secularism is somehow the natural order of things. In fact, the global upsurge of religion in recent years suggests otherwise.

As sociologist Peter Berger argues in The Desecularization of the World, "the notion that we live in a secularized world is false." Secularization theory, derived from Enlightenment views of religion and popular in American academia in the 1950s and 1960s, held that the world would gradually abandon religious faith and free itself from the shackles of religion and superstition. But as Berger notes, "The world today is massively religious, and it is anything but the secularized world that had been predicted (be it joyfully or despondently) by so many analysts of modernity."