Fundamentalism
INTRODUCTION TO PART THREE
As is well known, the term “fundamentalist” was coined in 1920 by Curtis Lee Laws (d. 1946).1 The editor of a Northern Baptist newspaper, Laws was commenting approvingly on the “Fundamentals Conference” that had recently been held in Buffalo. As he noted, this event had brought together a doctrinally varied assortment of North American Protestants: “pre-millennialists, post-millennialists, pro-millennialists and no-millennialists”—though he was happy to add that the group included no one who had repudiated “the blessed doctrine of the second coming of our Lord.” What those attending the conference represented was “in every sense a conservative movement,” and at the conference they stood “solidly together in the battle for the re-enthronement of the fundamentals of our holy faith.” These, then, were good people, but the question was what to call them. Though he had just used the term himself, Laws did not favor “Conservatives”—it sounded too reactionary. He likewise rejected “Premillennialists” as too narrow; it was true that “premillennialists are always sound on the fundamentals,” but as we have seen, he stressed that the group was broad enough to include people of other doctrinal persuasions. “Landmarkers” fared no better; Laws considered it to have a “historical disadvantage” and to “connote a particular group of radical conservatives.”2 He then proceeded to his historic act of coinage: “We suggest that those who still cling to the great fundamentals and who mean to do battle royal for the fundamentals shall be called ‘Fundamentalists.’ ” He added that he was willing to be called one himself, and that when he used the word, it would be “in compliment and not in disparagement.”
Laws had, of course, no intention of inventing a concept that could be applied in a wider context. But the fact is that his definition is worded in sufficiently general terms to be readily applicable to any religious tradition within which one can distinguish a set of fundamentals. The result is that since 1920 the usage has been extended by analogy, so that we now hear about Islamic and even Hindu fundamentalism, though often in disparagement. There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with naming things by analogy. It is a key strength of human language that in using a word we are not rigidly constrained by the context in which it first appeared. Languages change and develop. So even if the analogy was initially questionable, in the long run this may be neither here nor there. But if we are to employ the term comparatively, we need to be self-conscious about our use of it. What feature or features must a form of religion possess to qualify as fundamentalist?
Because the analogy involved is a somewhat vague one and the use of the term unsettled, there is no single right answer to this question. What might be called a maximalist approach is to list a whole cluster of properties which, taken together, more or less characterize some style of religion that we encounter in the world today and to call this cluster “fundamentalist.”3 My own approach, by contrast, is a minimalist one: I will select a single feature, incidentally one linked to the original North American context but also at variance with it, and I will use the term exclusively to refer to forms of religion that display this feature. I am not thereby implying that other usages are illegitimate, but I make no contribution to debates that revolve around them.
To identify the feature in question, let us take it as given that we have to do with religious traditions of some antiquity that are not entirely at ease in the modern world. Broadly speaking, such traditions can react to their discomfort in one of two ways: flexibly or inflexibly. In the North American Protestant context those who responded flexibly were the modernists. But our interest is in the forms of religion that refuse to bend (or at least prefer not to be seen to bend). They can display their unwillingness to compromise in two rather different ways, what might be called the “upstream option” and the “downstream option.”
To clarify this distinction, let us say that somewhere in the distant past your religion has its source, whence it issued as a mountain stream, later becoming a river and meandering through the plains on its way to the present, accumulating and depositing a great deal of silt in the process. What part of this course do you consider normative? At one extreme you might ascribe value only to your religion as it emerged at source, in all its pristine purity; this is the upstream option. At the other extreme, you might ascribe value only to the religion as it was passed on to you by your elders and betters, whom you see as having preserved, not polluted it; this is the downstream option. Put in more familiar terms, the upstream option is religious fundamentalism, whereas the downstream option is religious conservatism. Thus the Protestant fundamentalist and the Catholic conservative may be equally devoted to their respective religious heritages, but they want to do very different things with them: the fundamentalist to restore his heritage to its original condition, the conservative to keep his heritage the way he found it. In other words, whereas Laws saw “conservative” and “fundamentalist” as alternative labels for the same people,4 my usage makes a basic distinction between them.
The North American Protestants who have been calling themselves fundamentalists for the best part of a century do nevertheless qualify as fundamentalists in my sense of the term. An essential point is that they display an “unwavering faith in an inerrant Bible” and a willingness to live by it.5 But it is not this faith alone that makes them fundamentalists for me: it is also crucial that they proclaim no such faith in the inerrancy of the preachers and teachers from whom they received their religion. To spell this out a little more elaborately, what I am requiring of fundamentalists worth the name is three things: that they should identify one component of their religious tradition as its foundation while the rest is superstructure; that they should locate authority in the foundation rather than the superstructure; and that they should take the authority of the foundation seriously in a substantive way. People for whom foundation and superstructure are indistinguishable, or who locate authority outside the foundation, or who pay little or no substantive attention to it, are not what I call fundamentalists.
Having said what I propose to mean by fundamentalism, there are three points I should add about it before we proceed to our case studies.
The first is that religious heritages are likely to differ in the degree to which they lend themselves to fundamentalization. The differences may relate either to form or to substance. Thus, on the formal side, whereas any heritage can be conserved, a pagan folk-cult whose remembered past possesses no autonomy in relation to its present may not be easy to fundamentalize; by contrast, a religion that is heir to a stable and ramified written heritage is likely to prove more amenable. On the substantive side, heritages vary in the extent to which they preserve aspects of the past that are adaptive in the present. Dusting them off in a fundamentalist vein may or may not deliver identities and values that are attractive under modern conditions. Undesirable things can lurk in old and forgotten places, and desirable things may have entered the tradition only at a later stage. Here fundamentalists are not to be thought of as simple-minded. It is rare for a fundamentalist to be possessed by a desire to go back to his foundation so pure and innocent that he does not care what he finds when he gets there. In short, heritages are not to be thought of as interchangeable, either formally or substantively.
The second point is that the sharp conceptual distinction I have made between fundamentalism and conservatism may not work out so neatly in the real world. Being religiously uncompromising does not commit a person to one end of the spectrum or the other. Intermediate positions are also viable, and just where one positions oneself may depend on the issue or the context. In other words, my concepts of fundamentalism and conservatism are in the nature of ideal types; in practice we are more likely to be dealing with matters of degree.
The third point is that the account of fundamentalism given above does not necessarily tell us what fundamentalists are up to. There are two aspects to this. One arises from the fact that fundamentalists in non-Western contexts, unlike conservatives, have something significant in common with their bête noire, the Westernizers.6 This shared feature is their rejection of the here and now, or large parts of it, and their determination to replace it with something else. The difference is that where Westernizers seek to do this by importing an alien culture from elsewhere in the contemporary world, fundamentalists seek to do it by importing an ancient one from within their own past. These are not, of course, equivalent courses of action. Importing an alien but contemporary culture is more likely to be adaptive but no salve to wounded pride; by contrast, restoring one’s own ancient culture is good for one’s sense of pride but less likely to prove adaptive. Yet the scope for what might be called unacknowledged Westernization is in one respect greater for principled fundamentalists than it is for unbending conservatives. Their loyalty to a distant past gives fundamentalists greater leeway for jettisoning what they don’t want while recovering what they do want; as a result of this strategic time-depth, their convictions are not necessarily a medieval straitjacket.7 The other aspect to bear in mind is a countervailing one: depending on the history of the religion, fundamentalism and conservatism may or may not have significant common ground on substantive issues. The more such ground they share, the more compatible, indeed overlapping, their respective followings are likely to be.
With these points in mind we can go on to look at the role played by fundamentalism as I have defined it in modern Islam, Hinduism, and Latin American Catholicism.
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1 Laws, “Convention side lights,” 834; see Marsden, Fundamentalism and American culture, 159, and Ammerman, “North American Protestant fundamentalism,” 2. For the background to the term “fundamentals,” see Marsden, Fundamentalism and American culture, 118–19.
2 Landmarkism was an uncompromising Baptist movement that took shape in the 1850s (see Leonard, Baptists in America, 25–26, 118–20, 144–47, 151–53; for the name, cf. Proverbs 22:28: “Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set”).
3 This is the approach taken in Almond et al., Strong religion (based on the Fundamentalism Project), especially 93–98.
4 In 1921 he quietly celebrated the success of his coinage of the previous year by remarking that “aggressive conservatives—conservatives who feel that it is their duty to contend for the faith—have, by common consent, been called ‘fundamentalists’ ” (Marsden, Fundamentalism and American culture, 169).
5 Ammerman, “North American Protestant fundamentalism,” 5. She describes this belief as “central to the identity of fundamentalists” (6).
6 The equivalent of Westernization in the North American fundamentalist context was the spread of modernism, denounced by one of its enemies in 1924 as “a revolt against the God of Christianity” (Marsden, Fundamentalism and American culture, 3–4). But even here modernism was not perceived as homegrown: the fundamentalists saw it as ethnically alien, specifically German (148–49, 159).
7 In practice, of course, fundamentalists may be unprincipled and conservatives may bend.