The Great Revival: Understanding Religious "Fundamentalism"

One of the difficulties of attempting to determine family resemblances among different types of fundamentalism is deciding whether what is at work is a political ideology garbed in religious terminology or a religious movement defining itself largely or entirely by religious values. Strong Religion at times seems to opt for the political definition but at other times seems more interested by the messianic, even eschatological, content of different movements. One insightful aspect of the book is its attempt to categorize the interaction of fundamentalists with the world outside their enclave in four ways: as world conquerors, as world transformers, as world creators, and as world renouncers. Those in the first category are for the most part predictable: al Qaeda, Iranian Shi'ite radicals, Hamas, Sikh militants, and, rather incongruously, the Moral Majority. But it does not seem self-evident that world transformers should include Pentecostalists in Guatemala and Hindu nationalists, or that Lubavitcher Hasidim and South Indian Christians should be lumped among the world creators.

A more serious difficulty with the book is an undercurrent of distaste that runs through parts of it for many of the groups under examination. It is as though the researchers had to don chemical-protective suits even to investigate the phenomenon of fundamentalism, as though it were a dangerous microbe that might harm them. This impression is reinforced by the title of Chapter 2, "Fundamentalism: Genus and Species." The references to Protestant Christian fundamentalism, moreover, seem to display both inconsistent terminology, on the one hand, and an unmistakable whiff of disdain on the other. At different times, "North American Protestants," "U.S. Protestant fundamentalists," and "New Christian Right" seem to be used synonymously. In discussing the American variety of Protestant fundamentalism, the authors include a scathing reference to an "upbeat American patriotism" that is supposedly "xenophobic (anti-German in the earlier twentieth century, anti-Soviet following World War II) and saturated with the rhetoric of manifest destiny." One does not have to have any interest in religion to conclude that "upbeat American patriotism" just might have had something to do with the Cold War or to know that "manifest destiny" was coined in 1845 not by a fundamentalist but by a thoroughly secular newspaper editor, John O'Sullivan, who sought simply to articulate the emerging American national doctrine of continental expansion.

The scholars also display something approaching intellectual dishonesty in their discussion of "martyrdom" in the Christian and Muslim contexts. "Christians, like Muslims," Strong Religion asserts, "have considered martyrdom a prime opportunity for holiness, and indeed, a direct ticket to heaven." This grossly distorts the difference between the Christian and the Islamic concepts of martyrdom. Within Islam, martyrdom is what happens when a person dies in jihad. Thus Palestinian suicide bombers, who try to kill as many civilians as possible while blowing themselves up in Israeli buses or discotheques, are praised by many fellow Muslims as martyrs. Christians are only martyrs when killed purely and simply for what they believe. Although Muslim "martyrs" may indeed enter paradise immediately, martyrdom within Christianity has nothing to do with entrance into heaven.

SPREADING THE WORD

Almost anyone interested in the rise of Christian conservatism (to use a nonpejorative term) as a cultural and political concept in the United States will quickly discover that although Protestant fundamentalism is indeed an identifiable movement in American history, it was numerically superseded by the late 1950s by what is now called "evangelicalism." Evangelicals believe as ardently as Protestant fundamentalists in the need to propagate the gospel, but they were determined to break out of precisely the enclave mentality into which the fundamentalists had chosen to retreat from the 1920s onwards. Strong Religion refers a few times to Bob Jones University, certainly a bastion of American fundamentalist thinking, but overlooks the important point that Bob Jones, Sr., virtually excommunicated evangelist Billy Graham from fundamentalism in 1957 because Graham wanted evangelicals to work with any Christian church that would accept them.

This fact is important to understand because the evangelical, not the fundamentalist, brand of Christianity seems to be expanding faster than any other religious movement in the world today, including Islam. (It is worth noting that fundamentalist Protestant Christians generally oppose strongly the Pentecostalist or charismatic experience, which is at the heart of much of the Christian growth in the developing world.) The evangelical Christian phenomenon in the southern hemisphere has been thoughtfully examined by Philip Jenkins in The Next Christendom. Jenkins argues that the southward expansion of Christianity in Africa and Latin America will have more profound consequences globally than the ongoing phenomenon of Islamism.